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Toxic ‘forever chemicals’ found in tap water of 197M Americans JR Culpepper November 5, 2026

WASHINGTON – About 197 million people in the U.S. drink drinking water contaminated with the toxic “forever chemicals” known as PFAS, according to test data released by the Environmental Protection Agency and recent state test results.

That’s 23 million more Americans exposed to PFAS in drinking water than the EPA found in previous tests. 

The number aligns with findings from a 2020 paper by Environmental Working Group scientists that estimated PFAS was in the water of 200 million Americans. 

The new EPA findings mark the last installment of tests of the nation’s drinking water supply conducted as part of the Fifth Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule, or UCMR 5, the regulation that required U.S. water utilities to test drinking water for 29 individual PFAS compounds.

The UCMR 5 data reveal 3,595 sites with detectable levels of PFAS, bringing the total number of known PFAS-contaminated sites to 13,459.

“The new data confirms what we feared: PFAS contamination of tap water is as widespread as our study estimated in 2020,” said David Andrews, Ph.D., EWG’s chief science officer. 

Protections under threat

The EPA results come against a backdrop of increasing environmental deregulation. The agency is in the final stages of rolling back limits on four PFAS chemicals. 

The agency is retaining first-time drinking water standards for the two most notorious PFAS – PFOA and PFOS. And the EPA set a health goal of zero for these two chemicals because it has identified no level in tap water that is without health risk. 

“We already know PFAS exposure has been linked to a variety of health harms and can be harmful in extremely small amounts. Delaying, weakening or abandoning PFAS limits would be detrimental to public health.” Andrews added.

In 2024, the Biden EPA finalized first-time limits on six PFAS in drinking water. The limits, called maximum contaminant levels, or MCLs, set enforceable standards for the amount of contaminants allowed in drinking water. 

In a reversal last year, Trump’s EPA announced plans to leave four PFAS unregulated – GenX, PFBS, PFNA and PFHxS. 

The agency plans to retain the PFOA and PFOS standards at 4 parts per trillion. But it also wants to extend the compliance deadline for meeting those standards to 2031. 

The EPA’s plan to reverse the four MCLs also likely contradicts an anti-backsliding provision in the Safe Drinking Water Act. That law requires any revision to a federal drinking water standard to “maintain, or provide for greater, protection of the health of persons.”

“This isn’t just a regulatory change, it’s a public health betrayal. These rollbacks will expose American families to chemicals linked to cancer and other serious health issues,” said Scott Faber, EWG’s vice president for government affairs.

“The EPA is abandoning science-based protections at the exact moment its own tests prove we need them most,” he added. 

Widespread PFAS pollution 

Even if the limits for PFOA and PFOS remain in force, scrapping the four other limits will make it harder to hold polluters responsible for endangering millions of Americans by releasing toxic forever chemicals into U.S. waterways. 

The EPA’s toxicity assessments of GenX and PFHxS – replacement chemicals for PFOA and PFOS – found that exposure to even extremely small doses could pose similarly serious health risks. Finalizing the rollback means the agency wouldn’t enforce limits on GenX and PFHxS in tap water.

EWG estimates nearly 30,000 industrial polluters could be discharging PFAS into the environment, including into sources of drinking water. Restrictions on industrial discharges would lower the amount of PFAS ending up in drinking water sources.

Other organizations have found similarly concerning levels of PFAS contamination as EWG’s estimates. A recent report from Environment America found that PFAS was detected in 83% of rivers, lakes, streams and other surface waters between 2022 and 2024.

“It’s time to turn off the tap and address drinking water contamination at the source. For PFAS, that’s chemical plants, industrial sites and any manufacturers unnecessarily using these chemicals,” said Faber.

Health risks of PFAS exposure

PFAS are known as “forever chemicals” because once released into the environment, they do not break down, and they can build up in the body. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has detected PFAS in the blood of 99% of Americans, including newborn babies. 

Very low doses of PFAS have been linked to suppression of the immune system. Studies show exposure to PFAS can also increase the risk of cancer, harm fetal development and reduce vaccine effectiveness. 

“Consumers shouldn’t have to worry about the safety of the water that comes from their tap,” Andrews said. “With 197 million people exposed to PFAS in their drinking water, government regulators must hold polluters accountable and ensure utilities have the resources to remove these toxic forever chemicals.”

While the cost of removing PFAS from drinking water should not fall on consumers, numerous  home filter options can help,” he added.

For people who know of or suspect the presence of PFAS in their tap water, a home filtration system is the most efficient way to reduce exposure. Reverse osmosis and activated carbon water filters can effectively remove these chemicals. But consumers should make sure to change their filters as recommended. 

In 2023, EWG researchers tested the performance of 10 popular water filters to evaluate how well each reduced PFAS levels detected in home tap water.

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The Environmental Working Group is a nonprofit, non-partisan organization that empowers people to live healthier lives in a healthier environment. Through research, advocacy and unique education tools, EWG drives consumer choice and civic action. Visit www.ewg.org for more information.

Areas of Focus Water Toxic Chemicals PFAS Chemicals EPA, state PFAS data confirm EWG’s 2020 estimate as Trump moves to scrap protections Press Contact JR Culpepper jr.culpepper@ewg.org (202) 779-9990 November 5, 2026

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Exelon asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to order PJM to adopt a “prompt” capacity auction, while Invenergy wants the Midcontinent grid operator to let HVDC merchant lines receive capacity payments.

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The centrepiece of every UN climate summit is for countries to negotiate the wording of a large number of legal agreements – and COP31 in the Turkish city of Antalya is no different.

These texts are hashed out behind closed doors in the “blue zone” at the COP, where diplomats from nearly 200 nations – not including the US – will be haggling over each individual verb.

Over the course of the two-week summit, negotiators will be trying to reach consensus on more than 100 separate agreements – but, first, they must agree which issues are on the agenda.

The complexity of this process can make it challenging to keep track of what countries are fighting about and how negotiations are progressing.

Carbon Brief’s real-time text tracker, below, offers a helping hand by decoding the agenda and keeping a searchable record of every document for each part of the negotiations.

The first column of the interactive tracker lists the topic of each agenda item, with further columns including dates, page counts and links to the original PDFs.

The table is searchable via the interactive text box and can be sorted using the arrow icons.

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This year’s talks come with a twist: Turkey holds the presidency and is hosting COP31, but Australia is jointly running the show as “president of negotiations”.

The pair have already announced their intention to produce a “cover text” – an overarching political document summarising key negotiated outcomes, along with issues not on the official agenda.

This could include a recognition that warming is set to “overshoot” the 1.5C limit and the impacts this is already causing. It may also include potential solutions, such as the Turkish presidency’s “electrification” target, for 35% of global final energy to come from electricity by 2035.

While the summit is not seen as a banner year for the negotiations, falling half-way between two “global stocktakes” of progress, there are still plenty of major topics up for discussion.

These include efforts to finalise the “global goal on adaptation” and whether to continue a contested process on how to cut emissions, known as the “mitigation work programme”.

Negotiators will also be trying to agree on the details of a new “just transition mechanism”, also referred to as the “Belém-Antalya mechanism for global just transitions” (BAM).

While most of the items on the agenda are agreed in advance, parties can suggest late additions. These must be signed off before negotiations can begin, often resulting in an “agenda fight”.

COP30 agreed to put two new items on the agenda for future summits.

These are the provision of climate finance by developed countries, under Article 9.1 of the Paris Agreement, and making global “finance flows” consistent with the treaty, under Article 2.1c.

Ahead of COP31, the African group of nations filed a request to add climate-related trade tariffs to the agenda. COP30 had agreed to annual “dialogues” on this matter at the Bonn climate talks.

The African group also wants further items added, on tripling adaptation finance and on funding for the Green Climate Fund, a flagship UN body designed to support climate action.

Ahead of the opening of the summit, Carbon Brief’s text tracker counts 104 substantive items on the agenda, not including procedural matters, such as the election of COP officials.

The figure below illustrates the status of the COP31 negotiations overall, in a traffic-light format. Each agenda item is colour-coded according to its current status.

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For topics shown in red, negotiators have not yet managed to put anything down on paper, perhaps because parties have fundamentally different views on how they should proceed.

For items in orange, negotiators are working on an “informal text”, which is an early draft setting out the views of different parties, but not yet expressed in formal legal language.

Once a draft legal agreement becomes available, topics will be colour-coded yellow. At this point, areas of remaining disagreement will be denoted in the text with [square brackets] and “options”.

As such, texts with many square brackets or options tend to be an indicator of a high level of disagreement between parties. For this reason, the tracker table above counts and displays the number of outstanding brackets and options in each document.

During the course of the summit, negotiators may work through many iterations of texts on each agenda item. These documents may include “bridging text”, designed to resolve differences of opinion and to find a “landing zone” that all groups can agree on.

Agreement is reached on a given topic once all brackets and options have been resolved, at which point the item will be coloured green in Carbon Brief’s traffic-light chart.

Where agreement cannot be reached, discussions may be subject to “rule 16”, meaning negotiations are postponed until the next session. These topics are colour-coded grey.

The figure below gives an at-a-glance overview of the status of the main topics up for negotiation.

(() => { const iframe = document.getElementById('cop31-agenda-status'); const iframeOrigin = new URL(iframe.src).origin; window.addEventListener('message', (event) => { if (event.origin !== iframeOrigin || event.source !== iframe.contentWindow) { return; } const message = event.data; if ( !message || message.type !== 'cop31-agenda-status:resize' || !Number.isFinite(message.height) || message.height < 0 ) { return; } iframe.style.height = `${Math.ceil(message.height)}px`; }); })();

As parties narrow down the options and brackets towards the end of each summit, they start to generate “clean” texts, which contain no areas of disagreement and can be converted into “draft decisions” that are ready for formal adoption at the closing plenary of the meeting.

Finally, at the closing plenary, each draft decision must be gavelled through by the COP president, signifying its formal adoption as a legal agreement and outcome of the summit.

This last step is usually a formality, but dramatic exceptions are possible.

During the closing plenary at COP29, the president of the meeting failed to adopt a deal relating to the “global stocktake” from 2023, which had called for “transitioning away” from fossil fuels.

Carbon Brief also ran text trackers for COP28, COP29 and COP30.

Words by Simon Evans. Tracker maintained by Ho Woo Nam.

Interactive: Who wants what at the COP31 climate change summit 02.11.2026 COP31 Antalya Experts: What China wants from the COP31 climate talks 29.10.2026 China policy Interview: COP31 president says electrification is ‘surest way to protect citizens’ 10.07.2026 COP31 Antalya Bonn climate talks: Key outcomes from the June 2026 UN climate conference 19.06.2026 Adaptation

The post Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP31 climate summit appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Councillors in the North Yorkshire village of Burniston said today they would continue to stand by their community in the face of an appeal over gas drilling and lower-volume fracking.

Extract from joint statement on Europa Oil & Gas appeal.
Full document at the end of this article

The company behind the scheme, Europa Oil & Gas, gave notice earlier this week that it would challenge the refusal of its planning application. It informed the stock market yesterday.

In a joint statement, Burniston Parish Council and the area’s North Yorkshire councillor, Derek Bastiman, said:

“Although the intention to appeal comes as no surprise, we are somewhat concerned that EOG [Europa Oil & Gas] have not listened in any way to the serious concerns that over 1,600 people expressed during the planning process.

“If it is possible to find a suitable, safe place for fracking and the underground dumping of chemicals, so close to where people live, we would be very surprised. We can say with great certainty, it is not here.”

The statement, signed by the parish council chair, Cllr Richard Parsons, and Cllr Bastiman, said the refusal of the planning application by North Yorkshire Council in May 2026 was “clear and absolute”.

It added:

“No-one, including Europa Oil and Gas ltd, were left in any doubt as to why the application was refused.”

North Yorkshire’s planning committee rejected the application on five grounds, despite a recommendation from officials to approve. The grounds for refusal were:

• Harm to the heritage coast and landscape
• Proximity to homes and impact on amenity
• Harm to the setting of the North York Moors
• Impact on tourism and lack of economic gain
• Conflict with council climate commitments

The statement added:

“The objections to this application were overwhelming and were clearly listened to by the Planning Committee. The words that were submitted were clear, they were accurate and they were precise. Many mistakes and missing information in the application were exposed. The planning committee listened, understood and delivered their decision in the most decisive manner.”

Cllr Parsons said:

“Cllr. Bastiman, myself and Burniston Parish Council stand absolutely alongside our community as a whole. We will continue to ensure that the voices of our communities are heard. We will continue to represent those voices. We listen to, understand and agree with the views of our community and the wider community. They reject the application in its entirety for all the right reasons.

“Nothing has changed, the refused application is still the same, the grounds for refusal remain as valid today, as they were six months ago. We expect the planning inspector, even if the request to hear this appeal is granted, to support the decision of the planning committee.

“The application was for a fracking process that has been shown to be far from safe. This is the wrong project, at the wrong time, in the wrong place.”

The statement said the parish council had been notified about the appeal “in what appears to be a rather unconventional manner”:

“No formal notice appears to have been received, just a laminated card attached to a public noticeboard in Burniston Village, by Europa Oil and Gas Ltd informing of the appeal and requiring ‘representations about this appeal’ by November 25th 2026.”

The Planning Inspectorate (PINS), which handles planning appeals, told DrillOrDrop that Europa’s notice, was part of a formal procedure, known as DMPO (Development Management Procedure Order) 2015.

This requires appellants to give 21 days’ notice of the appeal to any owners or tenants of the site.

The appeal will then be submitted to PINS, where it will be validated.

PINS will set out a timetable for the appeal process.

The local planning authority, North Yorkshire Council, must then notify all interested parties about the appeal and give them a deadline in which to submit written representations.

That date has not been set and is separate from the 21-day deadline mentioned on Europa’s notice.

261105 Burniston joint press releaseDownload

Lula’s victory has saved the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) for now, but its reliance on private investment, Global South debt, and dubious governance means that it is still a false solution for forests, regardless of who is in power in Brazil. 

This article was originally published by Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung

By Valentina Figuera Martínez and Oli Munnion

The re-election of Lula da Silva in Brazil’s presidential race is a huge victory for progressive politics in Latin America, narrowly avoiding descent once more into the chaos of the far-right Bolsonaro dynasty. Lula’s decisive win is also a victory against U.S. interventionism, and the Trump Administration’s efforts to impose its political, neocolonial and military dominance across the region.

However, one consequence of the result is that a lifeline has been thrown to the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF), a new and highly controversial forest finance scheme championed by the Brazilian government. A Bolsonaro victory would undoubtedly have been the final nail in the coffin for TFFF, a silver lining to an otherwise very big, dark cloud.

The TFFF is still on life support though—it has until the end of the year to secure USD 10 billion in initial funding, which it has so far failed to do, or face key investors such as the Norwegian government pulling out, regardless of whether Lula or Bolsonaro sit in the presidential chair.
This makes COP31 make or break for TFFF. Although not on the formal agenda of the UN climate negotiations, the scheme’s backers will be desperately seeking additional pledges in the corridors of the Antalya conference centre.

What Went Wrong in Belém?

Alongside the failure of COP30 in Belém, Brazil, to establish a binding roadmap to end deforestation, the TFFF also fell short of its promise to secure the “future of tropical forests”. Brazil’s flagship financing scheme had attracted only USD 6.7 billion in sponsor capital, well below the USD 25 billion initially required to operate at a full scale.

What it did attract was widespread opposition from civil society and Indigenous Peoples’ organisations. Messaging against TFFF featured prominently in demonstrations in Belém, and a statement rejecting TFFF and defending forest rights was signed by 205 organisations, many of which were participating in counter-mobilisations.1

The plan had been to use the USD 25 billion in sponsor capital to issue up to USD 100 billion of “senior market debt” (low interest rate, high repayment priority loans and bonds), at a one to four leverage, to build a total investment fund of USD 125 billion.

This sum would then be invested by the fund at a higher rate of return in order to generate an anticipated revenue of USD four billion per year, which would be paid to tropical forest countries in exchange for conserving one billion hectares of standing tropical forests.

In Belém, sponsor capital pledges from the Global North included Norway’s USD 3 billion, Germany’s €1 billion (USD 1.15 billion), and France’s €500 million (USD 577 million), totalling USD 4.7 billion, all with specific conditions and strings attached.

So far, more than a quarter of TFFF funds come from countries that are supposed to be its main beneficiaries

Brazil and Indonesia, which are two of the three largest tropical forest countries, committed USD one billion each in sponsor capital. That means that so far, more than a quarter of TFFF funds come from countries that are supposed to be its main beneficiaries.

In addition to these five countries, very small pledges from the Netherlands (USD 5 million), Portugal (USD 1 million), and the Minderoo Foundation (USD 10 million) brought the total to USD 6.7 billion, although this sum isn’t available immediately due to several of the conditions imposed.2

Since then, other pledges have trickled in, such as the UK’s £400 million (approximately USD 534 million), and another USD 500 million from the Netherlands post-election, taking the total to USD 7.8 billion. At the same time though, Europe’s steady march to the right and cooling of climate commitments has put some pledges in doubt. A member of the German Chancellor’s CDU budget committee has argued that Germany’s €1bn investment is hard to justify and should be removed from the 2027 national budget.

A “once-in-a-generation initiative (…) via an innovative financing mechanism” was promised, but what is the financial logic behind the TFFF and will it tackle the underlying drivers of deforestation? Let’s start at the beginning.

Whose Proposal Is It?

The Brazilian government claims that the TFFF is led by Global South tropical forest countries. In reality, it is a proposal written by bankers for bankers, and was conceived of in the Global North under the leadership of the World Bank.

One of its earliest iterations was a set of four papers published in 2018 by the Center for Global Development (CGD) under the title “Creating a Multilateral Wealth Fund for a Global Public Good: A Proposal for a Tropical Forest Finance Facility”. Among the authors is Kenneth Lay, former vice president and treasurer of the World Bank from 2006 to 2010. Other Global North contributors are cited, as well as officials from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.

However, there is no mention of Brazil, Indonesia or the Democratic Republic of the Congo in this initial documentation, and the participation of these tropical forest countries and the subsequent leadership of the Brazilian government have come later, giving legitimacy to the scheme.

A Neo-Colonial Economic Model Underlies the TFFF

According to the 2018 version of the scheme,

“TFFF is a proposal to mobilise significant low-cost resources which can be invested in private markets to generate a financial return for rewarding successful actions that contribute to achieving a global goal, reduced deforestation. (…) Utilising primarily public funds to generate investment profits from the private sector that in turn provide international finance for public goods could serve to move beyond the finite borders of overseas development aid.”

From its inception, the intention was clear: the TFFF was designed to use limited public funds to leverage much larger private investments in order to generate profit for wealthy investors and claim to contribute to “halting deforestation”. A convenient formula for limiting public contributions and maximising private returns, while claiming deforestation benefits in the Global South.

This original 2018 financial logic has been revived in the three concept notes subsequently presented by the Brazilian government3, which hinge on: 1) converting money borrowed from wealthy investor countries and companies into profit that can be used to “drive change in developing countries”; and 2) distributing these funds using a results-based aid approach once pre-agreed measurable outcomes are achieved.

In essence, it reproduces a neo-colonial and technocratic dynamic.

In essence, it reproduces a neo-colonial and technocratic dynamic that privileges “measurable outcomes” over lived realities, reducing complex social, cultural, and ecological factors to narrow metrics. What is easy to measure tends to be prioritised over what matters most, sidelining gender justice, Indigenous governance systems, collective rights, structural drivers of inequality and other forms of environmental harm beyond deforestation.

TFFF is presented as a “country-led” approach, but reinforces a paternalistic mindset in which donors and Global North actors “drive change” in the Global South, rather than addressing historical responsibility for climate breakdown, ecological harm, colonial crimes, and debt injustices.

The TFFF is seen by its proponents as a unique opportunity to kill two birds with one stone, allowing private investors to make money and secure corporate greenwashing by reporting their alleged “contributions” to ‘Net Zero commitments’ and ‘nature positive finance’, such as the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD)4. All of which have been denounced by civil society as controversial schemes to perpetuate corporate abuses, human rights violations and environmental crimes.

Who is Really Funding the Fund?

One of the most concerning aspects of the scheme is its heavy reliance on bond markets for Global South debt. In essence, the money used to “protect” tropical forests will be largely paid for by countries in the Global South, through debt servicing and payments to wealthy international investors. As the Third World Network has warned, the real financing will come from “developing countries themselves, disguised by the international capital markets as ‘natural’ return on investments”.

This reflects a perverse money-machine logic: the TFFF will borrow billions of dollars from sponsors and wealthy investors at a lower interest rate, and then invest those resources heavily in emerging market bonds, issued, for example, by highly indebted Global South countries or companies driving deforestation that need immediate liquidity, at a higher rate of return. These emerging market bonds are issued at higher interest rates as they are judged to involve higher risk for the lender (in this case, the TFFF), as it is assumed, for example, that Global South borrowers are more likely to default.

The TFIF will make its money through deepening the debt crisis and insolvency in the Global South.

The profit generated through this difference in interest rates (and often unjust assessment of risk) will then be used primarily to repay lenders, cover World Bank fees, and service interest on sponsor capital. Only if there are profits left over following these transactions would any funds actually be transferred to tropical forest countries. Therefore, the TFIF will make its money through deepening the debt crisis and insolvency in the Global South, at a time when debt levels are already unprecedented.

Merel van der Mark, Forests and Finance Coalition Coordinator and an expert on financial mechanisms, has made the link between a failure of the Global North to pay what is owed when it comes to climate and biodiversity finance, and the shift towards private finance to make up the shortfall.

In an interview given for this article, she explains how

“for years and years, tropical forest countries have asked for support from richer countries, for the protection of their forests. But rich countries have failed to mobilise the amounts that are needed to achieve real forest protection.”

“So the TFFF seems to me a sad acknowledgement that rich countries are not doing their part, and that the only way to mobilise them to allocate money to forest protection is if they get their money back, with interest. So in that sense, I think that TFFF does not mobilise finance in an equitable way.”

Deforestation as a Market Failure

The TFFF’s rationale is that by valuing standing tropical forests, the fund will address a “market failure” by assigning a value to, and paying for, the “ecosystem services” provided by tropical forests, thereby incentivising their protection over their destruction or degradation. The financialisation of nature is therefore the proposal’s driving force, where forests are turned into a market value that can generate returns, prioritising capital accumulation above human rights, ecosystem integrity, and all other considerations.

This poses a profound contradiction: the dominant economic system that turns nature into a financial asset is destroying the cultures, practices, rights and relationships to territories of Indigenous Peoples, local communities, women, and youth—the commodification of nature is therefore not compatible with respecting the interdependent complexities that make up an ecosystem.5

The structural drivers of deforestation are precisely the same commodity supply chains and industrial processes that fuel the current economic system.

Aligning an economic and financial system designed to extract wealth from nature and forest-dependent peoples with the protection of tropical forests is a paradox in itself. The structural drivers of deforestation are precisely the same commodity supply chains and industrial processes that fuel the current economic system: agribusiness, intensive livestock farming, mining, fossil fuel extraction, infrastructure development, logging for pulp and paper and biomass energy, among other economic sectors.

The same financial system that will sustain the TFFF generates vast profits from companies driving deforestation. It’s like deliberately fighting a losing battle, just to ensure profits for wealthy investors.

The Propaganda Trap: IPLC “Advice” Is Not the Same as Decision-Making Power

A key pillar of the TFFF is that tropical forest countries will allocate a minimum of 20% of payments they receive to supporting Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs). This means that if a tropical forest country receives USD four per hectare of standing forest, 80 cents would have to be allocated to IPLCs.

Subsequently, the most recent TFFF proposal (Concept Note 3.1) developed “Guiding Principles for the Allocation to Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities”, and established a “Technical and Scientific Advisory Panel” and an “IPLCs Advisory Council”. Primarily composed of 10 IPLC representatives, the IPLCs Advisory Council will only advise the TFFF Board, and will have no access to decision-making over mobilising and managing the fund’s overall resources. Moreover, the members of the IPLCs Advisory Council will need to be approved by the TFFF Board.

The really important decisions will be taken by the Board of the Tropical Forest Investment Fund (TFIF), which is the “financial heart” of the fund and responsible for managing the capital (discussed in more detail below). As the World Rainforest Movement (WRM) points out in its analysis of the scheme, it is a mechanism steeped in colonial rationale. Giving IPLCs an advisory role and the power to decide how a fraction of the leftover resources are spent is not the same as giving them full access to decision-making and participation in the fund’s governance structure.

Chief Ninawa Huni Kui, an Indigenous leader from the Brazilian Amazon and president of the Federation of the Huni Kui Indigenous People in Acre, Brazil, is highly skeptical of the scheme. In an interview given for this article, he said:

“I don’t believe we will have positive results with those actions. The Tropical Forest Forever Facility is just another propaganda trap that will generate huge profits [for wealthy investors]. From a critical perspective, it is a form of co-optation: involving Indigenous Peoples without letting them make the decisions. It’s another deception. The fund’s decisions will not respond to the real desires and needs of all peoples. This ends up weakening the Indigenous movement, rather than strengthening it”.

In addition to concerns about decision-making, the Huni Kui leader also sees the TFFF’s speculative nature as a contradiction to the cosmovision of Indigenous Peoples. “A capitalist fund is very contrary to the spiritual worldviews of Indigenous Peoples, to the relationship between bem viver6 and territories. Financial resources cannot be confused with bem viver. ‘I’ll give them some money and they’ll have a better relationship with nature.’ It’s not about that. We’re talking about a deeper notion; it’s about reverence and recognition of nature,” he said.

On top of this, the fund’s stated commitment to equity, rights and inclusion—expressed through the introduction of “funding access modalities” for IPLCs and tropical forest countries—is not guaranteed in the event of market stress, liquidity pressure, drawdowns or default. Even if the financial architecture of the fund remains intact, tropical forest countries, and therefore IPLCs, may receive no payments, as priority would be given to repaying investors.

TFIF: the Real Decision-Making Player

The governance structure of the TFFF involves two independent entities: the Tropical Forest Investment Fund (TFIF) and the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (“the Facility” or TFFF).

The TFIF will be responsible for mobilising and managing financial resources, and will take important decisions through the TFIF Board, a central institution in the scheme. The TFIF will have its own governance structure and the freedom to make “market-driven decisions”, which will inevitably mean prioritising economic interests over rights. The TFFF will be limited to “oversee[ing] the forest cover rewards system, including eligibility criteria, monitoring methodologies, and disbursement rules”.

The TFFF Board will include eighteen member countries: nine sponsor countries and nine non-sponsor tropical forest countries that meet the criteria set out in the Facility Charter, the fund’s institutional governance framework, which will guide implementation arrangements, eligibility criteria, and other foundational considerations. All sponsor countries contributing at least USD one billion to the TFFF will be granted a seat on the TFFF Board, until the total number reaches nine.

The Technical and Scientific Advisory Panel and the IPLCs Advisory Council will function under the supervision of the TFFF Board, which limits their decision-making power in key areas such as conflict resolution, enforcement action, defining indicators, and setting baselines. This contradicts principles of Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) and weakens democratic control.

On the other hand, the TFIF Board will consist of “professionals” with the required “expertise”, and will be nominated and appointed by the “Sovereign Sponsors” (national governments providing sponsor capital) from an “independent committee’s recommendation”.

The Role of the World Bank

The World Bank will be the scheme’s trustee and host the TFFF Secretariat, and may also “provide certain Treasury Management services to TFIF”. Its reputation has been discredited in the Global South as it has been widely recognised for sinking countries in debt, imposing unjust conditions on loans, shaping economies to benefit big corporations instead of people, and even backing military dictatorships.

The TFFF will therefore be hosted by and benefit an organisation responsible for promoting policies that exacerbate inequalities and ecological impacts in the Global South7, which could prove even more problematic in times of global crisis and financial instability.

The payment hierarchy that the World Bank will oversee will be determined according to the revenues of the TFIF, and will be prioritised in the following way:

1. Bond-holders, including “debt service and fees payments” to those who lent their money to the TFFF and World Bank fees;
2. Other Private investors;
3. Sovereign sponsors, which are mainly state loans;
4. In last place, eligible tropical forest countries that have a deforestation rate lower than 0,5 percent.

If revenues decline, payments to tropical forest countries will be the first to be postponed, and if things get even worse, the TFIF will “commence an orderly liquidation”.

This payment hierarchy matters: in years when returns are low, forest-based payments would be reduced before investor returns are affected. In extreme market downturns, forest-related payments might pause altogether. Next in line would be reductions in payments to sovereign sponsors, further protecting the interests of private investors.

Payments to IPLCs will therefore be the lowest priority, while the interests of sponsors and wealthy private investors will be protected through the fund’s investment strategy. Trying to align profit-making with environmental outcomes in this way could therefore put more pressure on forest-dependent communities, as it is ultimately they that will bear the greatest risk burden from market volatility, potential liquidation, and penalties.

Will the TFFF Incentivise Investments that Harm Forests?

Although the TFFF’s concept note 3.1 states that investments in deforestation, coal, peat, oil, and gas will be excluded, the fund’s unclear investment exclusion criteria are a serious concern. Questions remain unanswered about whether and how the criteria would effectively prohibit investments in sectors that cause deforestation, and ensure that companies that are linked to harmful biodiversity impacts would not benefit from the scheme.

Van der Mark points out that there are many more industrial sectors that have “impacts on biodiversity, like the use of agrotoxics and intensive water use, that are for now not excluded. And here lies a tension, because if the exclusion criteria are too strict, they will exclude too many activities and the fund won’t be able to generate the returns it needs to make the payments to forest countries.”

Generating profits from speculative financial markets while relying on exclusion criteria to avoid investing in biodiversity-destroying activities reveals a fundamental contradiction at the fund’s core. What’s the point in creating a scheme that could lead to social and environmental harms if safeguards are not developed and strictly enforced?

The TFFF also claims that it will have strict criteria to ensure that payments to tropical forest countries will be reduced significantly if their deforestation rates increase. However, as van der Mark explains, there is a risk of leakage to other biomes if TFFF-related payments mean that commodity production just expands into areas not covered by the scheme.

Furthermore, “there is also the risk that intensification of production on already converted areas, through the use of more fertilisers and pesticides, will harm nature in other ways than through deforestation.” The TFFF’s criteria are not able to mitigate either of these risks.

The TFFF may become another tool to instrumentalise finance for destruction

Civil society organisations have long warned about the urgent need to halt destructive finance that is directed towards activities that harm forests and biodiversity. Ironically, by its design, the TFFF may become another tool to instrumentalise finance for destruction, displace forest loss into other biomes within eligible tropical forest countries, and detract from efforts to fundamentally change how international finance flows.

The current climate and biodiversity finance architecture—designed to support the goals of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)—is subservient to the extractive economic model. The barriers to accessing funding by Global South countries, such as power asymmetries, debt injustices and challenges in resource mobilisation are not going to be overcome with debt-driven conservation schemes like the TFFF.

“As much as it’s important to mobilise finance for nature protection, as TFFF is trying to do, it is even far more important to regulate harmful finance. If destructive finance is not halted, it’s like mopping the floor with the tap still open,”

explains van der Mark.

“To really halt destructive finance, we must address the core problem: our economic system built on extractivism and a structural dependence on perpetual growth. This growth imperative drives ecological overshoot, social inequity, and financial practices that externalise harm while privatising gains. We need to shift to an economic system that operates within planetary boundaries, that restores ecosystems, and prioritises sufficiency over accumulation.”

Real Solutions: Addressing the Root Causes of Deforestation and Biodiversity Loss

Market-based approaches to climate change and biodiversity loss are constantly embroiled in scandals and facing serious questions over integrity.8 Concerns over human rights violations and poor performance records demand alternative approaches rooted in human rights, traditional knowledge, and gender justice.

An effective funding mechanism must aim to address the root causes of deforestation, climate change and biodiversity loss, as well as transform dominant economic and financial structures to prioritise nature and social equity over private interests. While common but differentiated responsibilities among countries are a crucial foundation to build strong finance architecture around, the TFFF design has major flaws and won’t be able to mobilise resources in a sustained, gender-responsive, equitable and predictable manner for tropical forest countries. Instead, the TFFF is a speculative financial mechanism that will feed off Global South debt and gamble on volatile financial markets amid geopolitical instability.

The much-lauded 20 percent direct access to funds for IPLCs is a trap designed to buy support from Indigenous groups: having a say over the leftovers is not the same as having full governance power over the fund. Indigenous Peoples, local communities, women and youth must have full access to decision-making in the entire governance structure of any fund that truly wants to be effective.

An effective fund must ensure continuous capacity-building, legal protection, and strong regulations to protect land rights, alongside a robust grievance mechanism. It must also actively support efforts to dismantle the financial incentives that drive deforestation, while strengthening legal systems to address the high levels of risk faced by environmental defenders when protecting their territories.9

An effective fund must ensure continuous capacity-building, legal protection, and strong regulations to protect land rights

Moreover, institutional arrangements and policy decisions that genuinely aim to enable transformative change must address underlying structural constraints, including:

Debt restructuring and cancellation10, and tax justice: priority must be given to relieving the fiscal pressures on Global South countries to expand commodity production and dependence on destructive activities. Public sources of funding must be increased to fund social and environmental priorities, rather than perpetuating the debt crisis. In this context, taxing the super-rich and extractive sectors is an urgent conversation to design an efficient fund capable of addressing the root causes of deforestation and biodiversity loss.

Recognition of ecological debt: Global North countries are historically responsible for the majority of biodiversity destruction and ecological degradation, but they continue to evade their responsibilities. Only two countries have contributed their share of USD 20 billion per year agreed under the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF)11. An effective fund must ensure not only human rights-based and gender-responsive approaches, but also recognise the colonial legacies of nature depletion and its implications for societies, economies, traditional cultures, and ecosystems.

Increasing public finance for biodiversity and climate action while lessening the fiscal pressures that push Global South countries toward biodiversity-harming activities is essential to achieving meaningful and lasting outcomes.

In Conclusion: The Ecological Collapse Caused by Capitalism will not be Solved with More Capitalism

Genuine efforts to curb deforestation demand moving away from market-based approaches that perpetuate wealth accumulation and greenwashing, and instead support inclusive decision-making while confronting the structural drivers of forest loss. The TFFF cannot meaningfully challenge agribusiness, extractive industries, illegal logging, false solutions, and perverse incentives that sustain destructive activities.

Forest protection requires robust, rights-based public financing mechanisms.

At its core, the TFFF is a leveraged bet on risky emerging market debt12 that embodies contradictory approaches to forest conservation and diverts attention from the urgent need to halt the expansion of extractive sectors. It also obscures the role of state policies—often shaped by pressures from the international financial system—that render extractivism a perceived necessity for maintaining financial stability.

Forest protection requires robust, rights-based public financing mechanisms that place ecosystem integrity and the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities at the center, rather than market-driven schemes that demand regulation, investment screening, and social and environmental safeguards.

Real solutions are already being built on the ground, and we must work towards ensuring that the right financial resources, as well as political, social and economic conditions, are in place to allow them to flourish. These alternatives need to be strengthened, policies must be coherent, and key conditions such as land rights must be guaranteed.

Recognising that forests and biodiversity cannot be treated as commodities or financial assets is essential. Fundamentally, the ecological collapse caused by capitalism will not be solved with more capitalism.

• 1“NO to TFFF, YES to Forest Rights. Statement from Civil Society Organisations on the Launch of the Tropical Forests Forever Fund (TFFF)”, Global Forest Coalition (GFC), November 2025, https://globalforestcoalition.org/no-to-tfff-yes-to-forest-rights/. 
• 2See “Investment Tracker,” TFFF Watch, https://tfffwatch.org/investment-tracker/Norway.
• 3The first Concept Note was published by the Brazilian government in July 2024, the second one in February 2025, the third one in August 2025, and the fourth one (Version 3.1) was released in October 2025. 
• 4The TNFD is a voluntary initiative for corporate greenwashing made up of a group of large corporations–including many with a terrible track record in environmental issues. It is based on the core claim that more self-reporting by corporations on their nature-related impacts is key to solving the biodiversity crisis. This taskforce has been developing a framework on what a business should report on. To learn more see “The TNFD: What it is, who’s behind it and why it’s a major greenwashing risk,” Global Forest Coalition (GFC), December 2022. The TFFF will allow corporations profiting off environmental abuse to report “compliance”with the TNFD, and apply “financial products” that supposedly “support nature” to greenwash their polluting activities. 
• 5For an analysis on commodifying nature and avoiding a real change see “Marketing the planet: The financialization of nature”, by Helena Paul, Radical Ecological Democracy, January 2022, https://www.cbd.int/cms/ui/forums/attachment.aspx?id=417&exp=639052793791354386&uid=1&key=07baea2208edfad639fb5530f97da407.
• 6South American Indigenous philosophy that favors deep relationships between humans and nature over individualistic material and consumerist development. See Alberto Acosta, The Dictionary of Radical Alternatives, https://dictionaryofradicalalternatives.org/Concepts:Buen_Vivir/Alberto_Acosta/English; and Eduardo Gudynas and Alberto Acosta, “La renovación de la crítica al desarrollo y el buen vivir como alternativa”, Utopía y Praxis Latinoamericana, 2011, https://www.redalyc.org/pdf/279/27919220007.pdf. 
• 7See also The World Bank: A Critical History (2023), by Éric Toussaint, https://www.plutobooks.com/product/the-world-bank-a-critical-history/.
• 8“Rise in legal challenges over carbon credit schemes”, The Guardian, June 25, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jun/25/courts-corporate-carbon-offsetting-claims-lse-report; Souparna Lahiri and Valentina Figuera Martínez, Biodiversity Offsetting: A corporate social license to perpetuate biodiversity destruction and gender inequality, Global Forest Coalition (GFC), October 2024, https://globalforestcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/EN_Biodiversity-Offsetting-Briefer.pdf.
• 9For an investigation on the struggles of environmental defenders see “Collective Power: The Struggle for Protection for Land and Environmental Defeders” September 16, 2026, Global Witness, https://globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/land-and-environmental-defenders/collective-power/.
• 10For an analysis of the key reasons why debt is relevant to biodiversity protection and should remain on the agenda of international policy processes, see Jessica Dempsey and Audrey Irvine-Broque, “Addressing debt is critical to halting biodiversity loss”, March 2022, Third World Network, https://www.twn.my/title2/briefing_papers/twn/Debt%20biodiversity%20TWNBP%20Mar%202022%20Dempsey.pdf. 
• 11Pettinotti, L., Cao, Y., Kamninga, T. and Colenbrander, S. (2024) A fair share of biodiversity finance? Apportioning responsibility for the $20 billion target by 2025. ODI Working Paper. London: ODI (https://odi.org/en/about/our-work/a-fair-share-of-biodiversity-finance)
• 12See Max Alexander Matthey and Aidan Hollis, “The Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF): Brazil’s $125bn Rainforest Gamble,” Substack, September 2025, https://substack.com/home/post/p-174014902. 

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IN THE SUMMER of 2018, Yellowhead Institute was just a baby. 

We launched earlier that year and found ourselves in the midst of a political crisis in Indian Country. Justin Trudeau had been elected and sought sweeping changes to Indigenous policy, including a proposal for an alternative to the Indian Act. We wanted to understand the shape of this alternative to help communities prepare and intervene. Our small 2-3 person team poured over ministerial statements, budgets, new laws and policy; we spoke to dozens of First Nation leaders and activists; and slowly pieced together the vision for the “Rights Framework,” which we then went on to critique in our first ever Special Report in October 2018. It landed. We presented the findings to First Nation political organizations around the country. Then, at the 2018 Assembly of First Nations (AFN) Special Chiefs Assembly, a young Delaware leader named Megan Logan took the stage on behalf of First Nation youth opposed to the Rights Framework, citing our report. Chiefs in Assembly passed a resolution against the Framework. 

That was the moment we knew Yellowhead had a place in the national dialogue on Indigenous issues; that we could produce rigorous, independent, and critical research and analysis that would support communities in their efforts to make change. 

Over eight years later, we are still doing that work. In fact, this is the 200th publication of the Yellowhead Brief. Our short-form, argumentative or descriptive research and writing has endured. 200 publications. Of course, Yellowhead does many things: on the research side, we publish four Special Reports every year, multiple special features, and our multi-year Red Paper projects. We run the Yellowhead School with two non-credit programs (the Misko Aki Knowledge Exchange, or MAKE, and Yellowhead Online), AND a degree program, the Public Administration and Indigenous Governance B.A. All of which are designed to provide critical tools, quality research, and transformational education designed to build solidarity and/or practice Native sovereignty.

But the Brief is the gate-way for most people into the Yellowhead galaxy. So, reaching this milestone is important for our team and it marks an occasion to reflect. As we do, it feels like so much has changed over our near ten-year run, and so much remains the same. There is a new Liberal Government, new proposals to change the collective relationship, and a new generation of young people telling their leaders that something is not quite right. Okiniwak, Walking Forward Together, and Here We Stand are just a few of the Indigenous youth groups based in Ontario organizing across the country, building community, taking stands on contemporary political issues in thoughtful ways, and challenging the rest of us to pay attention. There are many others.

These groups’ primary concerns revolve around the Carney Government’s Building Canada Strong(er) agenda and the related economic reconciliation framework that seeks to bring Indigenous communities along. Yellowhead has used the Brief to understand and explain the infrastructure being established to “Build Canada Strong” in pieces on Special Economics Zones, Cooperation Agreements, the climate costs of Bill C-39, But there is clearly more work to be done around the new consultation regime, the role of the Major Projects Office, environmental management, the proposed sovereign wealth fund, implementation of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and Indigenous rights more generally. 

Still, we know that Carney is not Trudeau. 

Where Trudeau sought to overhaul the machinery of government, was open to restitution, and created bilateral negotiations frameworks – all to build trust for a comprehensive approach to a new relationship – Carney is focused on a narrower set of priorities. Trudeau clearly had his critics (myself included), yet he makes Carney look like John A. MacDonald: a Prime Minister set on nation-building where Indigenous people are, more or less, in the way. Carney rarely speaks on Indigenous issues, and when he does, betrays his lack of interest or knowledge. As Cree Minister of Indigenous Services, Mandy Gull-Masty, reports on the Indian Act’s slow death, Carney is apparently unaware and makes a renewed pitch to scrap the legislation. His approach is decidedly unilateral and obtuse.

Meanwhile, we have hostile provinces. The young people of Here We Stand are pointing to Ontario’s Bills 5 and 140, designed to fast-track development and strip environmental protections in that province. Treaty 8 Chiefs have told Alberta their consultation framework is so weak they’ll meet soon in court (again). Saskatchewan is selling off First Nation lands, Quebec is erasing Indigenous languages through Bill 96, and B.C. just elected a party that campaigned on scrapping the provincial UNDRIP law. 

‘Round we go. Reconciliation arrives, does a few laps, and then quietly jogs off – a pattern seen throughout the highs and lows of Canadian history. We see the shift in our day-to-day: reconciliation is no longer an institutional focus, funders are shifting resources to other areas, and renewed racism creeps into our social media pages.

Still, in our near-decade of work we know that it’s in these times of confrontation that public education and useful, accessible research and analysis matters most. So, as we enter another valley in our collective relationship, Yellowhead will be there.

Citation:

King, Hayden. “In the Valley of Reconciliation: Yellowhead Institute & Crown-Indigenous Relations, 2018-2026” Yellowhead Institute. Nov 05 2026. https://yellowheadinstitute.org/2026/in-the-valley-of-reconciliation-yellowhead-institute-crown-indigenous-relations-2018-2026

Photograph: Round Dance by Stan Williams

 

The post In the Valley of Reconciliation: Yellowhead Institute & Crown-Indigenous Relations, 2018-2026 appeared first on Yellowhead Institute.

Australia’s gas giants turn on one another over domestic supply, export profits and who should pay for the government’s proposed gas reservation scheme. Behind the corporate accusations lies a more uncomfortable question: why should a major gas-exporting nation struggle to guarantee affordable gas for its own citizens?

5 November 2026

By the Donovan–Shell Archive

There is something wonderfully revealing about the spectacle unfolding in Australia’s liquefied natural gas industry.

Three enormous gas-exporting businesses are arguing over who should be obliged to supply Australian customers.

Not whether Australia possesses sufficient gas resources.

Not whether overseas customers will continue receiving enormous shipments of LNG.

But which company should shoulder the financial consequences of ensuring Australians can buy some of their own country’s gas.

The latest confrontation involves Santos, Shell and Origin Energy.

According to a report published by The Australian on 4 November 2026, Santos has accused its competitors of promoting a regulatory arrangement that would favour their existing operations while imposing disproportionate obligations on Santos’s Gladstone LNG project.

The accusation is serious.

It is also extraordinarily ironic.

Because independent reporting by ABC Australia has previously identified Santos’s own LNG operation as a major contributor to the very domestic gas-market problems the proposed regulations are intended to address.

The result is a corporate argument in which everyone claims to be defending Australia’s interests.

And everyone, naturally, would prefer somebody else to pay.

The latest accusation: Santos turns on Shell and Origin

The dispute centres on three LNG export developments on Curtis Island, near Gladstone in Queensland.

Shell operates Queensland Curtis LNG (QCLNG).

Australia Pacific LNG (APLNG) is associated with Origin Energy and ConocoPhillips.

Gladstone LNG (GLNG) is operated by Santos.

All three projects export Australian gas to international customers.

Their commercial positions, however, are significantly different.

According to The Australian, Santos objects to proposals supported by QCLNG and APLNG that would recognise exporters’ existing contributions to domestic gas supplies when calculating new reservation obligations.

Santos argues that this approach could allow its competitors to satisfy regulatory requirements using gas they already supply to Australian customers.

GLNG, by contrast, could be required to find additional domestic gas while continuing to honour overseas LNG contracts.

Santos considers that unfair.

Its competitors might reasonably respond that the greater unfairness would be to disregard their previous contributions while allowing an exporter that historically purchased domestic gas for export to escape additional obligations.

Welcome to the Australian LNG industry’s interpretation of burden-sharing.

Santos’s allegations about Shell’s exports

The November report contains allegations that deserve careful examination.

Santos claims that uncontracted spot LNG exports by QCLNG and APLNG increased from approximately 75 petajoules in 2021 to 122 petajoules in 2024.

That would represent an increase of approximately 63%.

Santos also alleges that domestic gas supplies from those projects declined over the period.

Separately, it accuses its competitors of seeking domestic gas margins of between 300% and 500%, linked to international LNG pricing.

These are substantial claims.

However, the figures are presented here as allegations attributed to Santos. They should not be treated as independently verified findings.

The distinction between contracted exports, spot sales, gross domestic deliveries and net domestic supply is essential.

A company might increase spot exports while remaining a net supplier to the domestic market.

Similarly, a claim about unusually high margins requires scrutiny of the underlying price, production costs, transport costs and contractual terms.

Without those details, it would be premature to conclude that Shell or Origin engaged in improper pricing.

Nevertheless, the allegations deserve examination.

Australian consumers have a legitimate interest in knowing whether gas producers are prioritising export opportunities when domestic buyers face high prices.

And Shell should not escape scrutiny simply because Santos has its own uncomfortable history.

The Santos glasshouse

The strongest reason to investigate Santos’s latest accusations is the extensive independent reporting already available.

On 8 September 2026, ABC Australia published an investigation examining the role of Queensland’s LNG exporters in Australia’s domestic gas problems.

Its findings were particularly damaging to the position advanced by Santos.

The report explained that GLNG had been developed with substantial LNG export capacity but insufficient dedicated gas reserves to meet all its export commitments.

Consequently, GLNG historically purchased gas from Australia’s domestic market to fulfil overseas contracts.

Energy analyst Saul Kavonic estimated that the volumes involved over the preceding decade were equivalent to approximately 20% of eastern Australia’s domestic gas demand.

That is an extraordinary comparison.

It does not mean Santos literally removed one-fifth of all domestic gas in every year, but it illustrates the cumulative scale of GLNG’s reliance on third-party supplies.

The ABC contrasted GLNG’s position with QCLNG and APLNG, which had predominantly been net suppliers to Australia’s domestic market.

In other words, Shell and Origin’s projects had historically contributed gas to domestic customers on a net basis.

Santos’s GLNG project had historically depended on acquiring gas from that market.

This is a material distinction.

It would be neither accurate nor fair to overlook it.

Shell deserves credit where the evidence supports it

This archive has documented Shell’s environmental controversies, fossil-fuel expansion, litigation and corporate conduct for decades.

But criticism should never become a substitute for evidence.

On this particular issue, Shell’s historical record appears more favourable than Santos’s.

The ABC investigation reported that QCLNG and APLNG had overwhelmingly been net domestic gas suppliers.

That does not establish that every Shell pricing decision was reasonable.

It does not answer Santos’s allegations about recent spot exports.

And it does not demonstrate that Shell’s preferred reservation model would necessarily produce the best outcome for Australian consumers.

But it does mean Shell has a legitimate basis for arguing that previous domestic contributions should be considered when designing future obligations.

A company that has already supplied substantial quantities of gas domestically may reasonably question a system that treats it identically to an exporter that historically drew gas out of the domestic market.

The difficulty is designing rules that recognise genuine contributions without allowing companies to claim credit for supplies that would have reached domestic customers anyway.

That is where the regulatory argument becomes particularly important.

How Australia reached this extraordinary position

The origins of the dispute lie in the rapid expansion of LNG exports from eastern Australia.

During the previous decade, enormous investments transformed Queensland’s coal-seam gas industry.

Three LNG export developments were constructed on Curtis Island.

They connected eastern Australian gas resources to international energy markets, particularly in Asia.

The projects promised investment, employment, export earnings and economic growth.

But the development of a major LNG export industry also exposed domestic customers to competition from overseas buyers.

Gas that might previously have been sold into the Australian market could now be exported.

In principle, increased production could satisfy both markets.

In practice, the availability, location, price and contractual commitments associated with gas supplies created significant complications.

GLNG’s dependence on third-party domestic supplies became a particularly contentious feature of this system.

ABC reporting has also examined historical transactions through which gas originally associated with domestic supply arrangements ultimately supported exports.

For Australian manufacturers requiring reliable gas at internationally competitive prices, these developments were hardly academic.

Higher gas prices can affect production costs, investment decisions and employment.

Households are affected directly through energy bills and indirectly through the cost of goods and services.

The basic policy question is therefore straightforward.

How can Australia remain a major LNG exporter while ensuring sufficient gas is available to domestic users on reasonable terms?

The answer has proved considerably less straightforward.

Canberra’s proposed solution: reserve gas for Australians

The Albanese government announced a national domestic gas reservation policy in December 2025.

After consultation and revisions during 2026, the government introduced legislation intended to require LNG exporters to contribute gas to the domestic market.

The current framework provides for domestic supply obligations of up to 20% of annual LNG export volumes.

The scheme is scheduled to commence in 2027, with supply obligations beginning on 1 January 2028.

Importantly, the legislation includes provisions allowing obligations to be adjusted to account for existing export contracts and infrastructure constraints.

The government argues that the scheme will improve domestic supply security and place downward pressure on gas prices.

Those outcomes remain policy objectives, not established results.

The details matter enormously.

A reservation requirement that produces genuinely additional domestic supply could improve market conditions.

A scheme that permits exporters merely to reclassify existing supplies, purchase domestic producers or exploit contractual exemptions might achieve considerably less.

The question is not simply whether 20% sounds like a reassuring number.

It is whether the legislation will change the actual quantity of gas available to Australian customers.

The battle over exemptions

Santos has advocated protections for existing export contracts and changes to the proposed regulatory obligations.

According to the November reporting, its preferred approach includes recognition of contracts predating the government’s December 2025 announcement, greater flexibility over commercial terms, and circumstances in which reservation requirements could be reduced or suspended.

Some of these arguments raise legitimate concerns.

Long-term LNG contracts involve substantial financial commitments.

Abrupt regulatory changes can create commercial uncertainty and potentially affect investment.

Australia also has an interest in maintaining reliable relationships with international trading partners.

But there is another side.

If existing contracts, contractual extensions and other exemptions are defined too broadly, the companies most responsible for domestic supply pressures could face relatively limited obligations.

ABC investigations published in October examined precisely this possibility.

Analysts warned that aspects of the proposed scheme might permit exporters to reduce their exposure through contractual arrangements, acquisitions or accounting mechanisms without necessarily increasing physical gas deliveries.

These are concerns about potential loopholes, not findings that Santos has unlawfully exploited them.

Nevertheless, they deserve serious attention before the legislation is finalised.

A reservation scheme that rewards clever paperwork more generously than additional domestic supply would be a remarkable achievement in regulatory futility.

The industry’s favourite argument: investment will suffer

The gas industry has repeatedly warned that intervention could discourage investment.

That argument should not be dismissed automatically.

Gas developments require substantial capital, long planning periods and confidence in regulatory stability.

Poorly designed obligations could make marginal projects less attractive.

But investment arguments also require context.

A country’s natural resources are not simply an unrestricted entitlement for exporters.

Governments have legitimate responsibilities to domestic consumers, industrial competitiveness and energy security.

The relevant policy challenge is to balance those interests.

Santos’s warnings about investment should therefore be considered alongside its own commercial incentives.

Shell and Origin’s proposals should receive the same treatment.

No company becomes a disinterested public-policy expert merely by submitting a consultation response.

And no proposal should be accepted simply because its supporters describe it as market-efficient.

The decisive question is whether the resulting framework delivers more gas to Australian users at prices that support households and industry.

What about Shell’s shareholders?

Shell’s major institutional investors include global asset managers such as BlackRock and Vanguard, whose funds have substantial interests in large international energy companies.

Such investors have an obvious interest in disciplined capital allocation, regulatory predictability and sustainable financial returns.

But the long-term interests of shareholders are not necessarily served by every opportunity to maximise export revenues.

Prolonged disputes with governments, public dissatisfaction over energy prices and increasingly restrictive regulation can create significant commercial risks.

A transparent and workable domestic gas framework may offer greater long-term stability than repeated confrontations over supply obligations.

For Shell, the challenge is to demonstrate that its Australian operations can deliver competitive returns while maintaining constructive relationships with the country supplying the resource.

That is not an unreasonable expectation.

It is the ordinary price of operating a major energy business.

The environmental contradiction nobody should overlook

There is another dimension to this argument.

All three companies are debating how natural gas should be allocated between domestic consumption and overseas exports.

Yet LNG remains a fossil fuel.

Its production, processing, liquefaction, transportation and combustion generate greenhouse-gas emissions.

Methane leakage can add materially to the climate impact.

The industry’s argument that gas can support energy security and replace higher-emitting fuels in certain circumstances does not eliminate those emissions.

Nor should a domestic gas reservation scheme be mistaken for an energy-transition strategy.

The immediate policy objective is to ensure sufficient affordable gas for existing users.

That may be important for industries that cannot readily electrify.

But Australia’s longer-term climate and energy objectives also require reducing dependence on fossil fuels where practical.

Shell’s continued commitment to LNG expansion therefore remains relevant to any broader assessment of its environmental record.

The current dispute illustrates how difficult it can be to reconcile export-led fossil-fuel growth, domestic energy affordability and climate commitments.

A dispute in which everyone has something to lose

The November confrontation is unusual because it exposes divisions within an industry that often presents a united front against government intervention.

Shell and Origin have reasons to seek recognition for their historical domestic gas contributions.

Santos has reasons to resist obligations that could increase its costs or complicate existing export arrangements.

The government wants to improve domestic supply without undermining export earnings and investment.

Consumers want affordable energy.

Manufacturers want reliable contracts and predictable prices.

And environmental advocates want a credible pathway away from continued fossil-fuel dependence.

These interests overlap in some respects and conflict sharply in others.

The most important task for policymakers is to ensure that the eventual rules reward genuinely additional domestic supply rather than the most effective corporate lobbying.

That will require transparency about export volumes, domestic deliveries, contractual exemptions and the basis on which individual obligations are adjusted.

Without such transparency, the public may struggle to establish whether the scheme has achieved its purpose.

Conclusion: the gas industry’s remarkable circular firing squad

Santos accuses Shell and Origin of putting exports first.

Shell and Origin can point to their historical contributions to Australia’s domestic market.

Independent analysts have questioned whether Santos’s own LNG development helped create the supply pressures now requiring government intervention.

Meanwhile, the industry warns that imposing new obligations could discourage investment.

Each argument contains issues worth examining.

None should be accepted uncritically.

The ultimate irony is that a country blessed with enormous gas resources has reached a position in which its major exporters are fighting over responsibility for supplying domestic customers.

It is an impressive achievement.

Not necessarily one to celebrate.

For Shell, this particular controversy does not justify automatic condemnation.

Its historical domestic supply record deserves recognition.

But that recognition should not become a blank cheque for its preferred regulatory arrangements or prevent scrutiny of its current export and pricing practices.

For Santos, the challenge is more uncomfortable.

Before accusing competitors of pursuing an export agenda, it must contend with independent evidence concerning GLNG’s longstanding reliance on domestic gas purchases to fulfil overseas commitments.

And for Australia’s government, the challenge is to produce a scheme that changes actual supply rather than merely redistributing obligations on paper.

Australia’s households and manufacturers do not need another competition in corporate finger-pointing. They need gas they can actually obtain at reasonable prices.

The LNG industry has become remarkably accomplished at exporting Australia’s natural resources.

Perhaps its next great technological breakthrough will be ensuring Australians can afford some of them.

A fictional conversation: Sir Henri Deterding and John Donovan

The following is an imaginary satirical exchange. Sir Henri Deterding died in 1939. No dialogue is presented as an authentic historical quotation.

SIR HENRI DETERDING: Donovan! I am informed that Shell is being accused of exporting too much gas.

JOHN DONOVAN: By Santos, Sir Henri.

DETERDING: Santos? Another oil and gas company?

DONOVAN: Indeed. One that has itself been criticised for buying Australian domestic gas to fulfil export commitments.

DETERDING: Ach! So the exporter accuses the other exporters of exporting?

DONOVAN: That is a reasonable summary.

DETERDING: Mein Gott. In my day we called this commerce. Today, apparently, it is a parliamentary inquiry.

DONOVAN: The Australian government wants exporters to reserve gas for domestic customers.

DETERDING: Sensible. A nation should not have to beg foreign customers to return its own resources.

DONOVAN: The companies are arguing over exemptions.

DETERDING: Naturally. Every industrialist supports regulation, provided it regulates somebody else.

DONOVAN: Shell may actually have the better historical domestic supply record in this particular dispute.

DETERDING: You are defending Shell, Donovan?

DONOVAN: Where the evidence warrants it.

DETERDING: Ach. Most irritating. I had hoped you were reliably unreasonable.

DONOVAN: I leave that to the corporate lobbyists.

DETERDING: Ja. Then perhaps there is hope for you yet.

Principal sources

The Australian, 4 November 2026: Santos accuses Shell and Origin Energy of pushing export agenda through gas reservation advocacy — subscription may be required.

ABC News, 8 September 2026: Gas crisis divides industry amid claims culprit getting away ‘scot-free’

ABC News, 12 October 2026: Critics say ‘Santos-sized loopholes’ will make gas reservation a joke

ABC News, 27 October 2026: Warnings gas culprit Santos could slip through reservation net

Australian Government, updated 30 October 2026: Gas Market Review and reforms

Australian Government, 10 September 2026: Securing more affordable gas for Australians

Editorial note and disclaimer

This article is independent journalism, analysis, opinion and satire based on publicly available reporting and government documentation as of 5 November 2026. It is not financial or investment advice.

Allegations attributed to Santos concerning Shell, Origin Energy, LNG export volumes and pricing margins are reported as allegations, not established findings. Independent reporting concerning GLNG’s historical domestic gas purchases is distinguished from claims of unlawful conduct. No such unlawful conduct is alleged here.

The fictional dialogue involving Sir Henri Deterding and John Donovan is entirely imaginary and intended solely as satire.

The article was prepared with AI-assisted research and drafting. The cited reporting and government material provide the factual basis; no claim is made that the full paywalled article was independently inspected.

Readers should consult the original sources and relevant company disclosures when assessing disputed commercial or regulatory claims.

The central factual distinction is supported by ABC’s independent investigation: GLNG historically relied on domestic gas purchases for export, whereas QCLNG and APLNG were predominantly net domestic suppliers. The government’s current framework specifies obligations beginning on 1 January 2028.

Shell Accused of Putting LNG Exports First — But Is Santos Throwing Stones from a Very Expensive Glasshouse? was first posted on November 5, 2026 at 10:20 am.
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The Southwest just got way too much of a good thing. Last weekend, a ferocious storm inundated communities and killed at least four people. Though precipitation is an essential component of Arizona’s desert climate, the state got two or three months’ worth of it in just a few days — far more than human infrastructure could handle all at once. Since September 20, an astonishing 28.84 inches of rain has fallen on Clovis, New Mexico, compared to its historical average of just 3.3 inches.

“This weekend was just adding more on the rough times that those communities in Southwest Colorado and Arizona and Utah and New Mexico have been having recently,” said Russ Schumacher, director of the Colorado Climate Center at Colorado State University, who’s also the state climatologist. “I think the El Niño connection is pretty clear.”

Indeed, that band of warm water in the Pacific could be priming much of the southern United States for a winter of increased precipitation, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s seasonal outlook. “Could an event like this have happened in a non-El Niño year?” asked Michael A. Crimmins, a climatologist at the University of Arizona. “It could have, but it would have been a lot harder to pull all of the ingredients together at the same time, and would have been a lot less likely.”

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.fxlabel{font-size:26px}.el-nino-precip-outlook#el-nino-precip-outlook svg.map .insetlabel{font-size:18px}} @media (max-width:480px){.el-nino-precip-outlook#el-nino-precip-outlook svg.map .fxlabel{font-size:38px}.el-nino-precip-outlook#el-nino-precip-outlook svg.map .insetlabel{font-size:24px}} @media (prefers-reduced-motion:reduce){.el-nino-precip-outlook#el-nino-precip-outlook *{transition:none !important}} A wetter winter looks likely across the southern US

Precipitation outlook through February 2027

Slightly favors wetterFavors wetterSlightly favors drierFavors drierEqual chancesWetterDrierEqual chancesPuerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands

“Slightly favors” means a 33–50 percent chance of the favored category, and “favors” means 50 percent or more. Hawaiʻi is shaded from CPC’s Hawaiian Islands outlook. Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands are unshaded; NOAA’s outlook suggests warmer temperatures in this region but publishes no corresponding probability.

Source: NOAA Climate Prediction Center

Clayton Aldern / Grist

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The looming problem this winter is heat, oddly enough. The unfolding El Niño is already the strongest on record, and it could get stronger still in the next few months. Although that amounts to just a handful of extra degrees in the Pacific, it injects a tremendous amount of energy into the atmosphere, scrambling weather the world over. The phenomenon is so influential, in fact, that it has helped cancel hurricanes over in the Atlantic, by messing with winds high up in the atmosphere. Accordingly, this year shattered the record for the latest first hurricane in a season by nearly a month. Normally by this time of year we’d have seen six of these cyclones, but 2026 has still only produced one.

The Southwest, though, gets no such relief from inclement weather. In addition to adding heat to the sky, the warmer waters of El Niño also increase atmospheric moisture. Even beyond the El Niño, temperatures in the Pacific have been running extra hot, which explains why the western part of the ocean has produced 10 hurricanes this season even as the Atlantic has remained quiet. (Overall, more than 90 percent of the excess heat that humans have pumped into the atmosphere has been absorbed by the oceans.)

All this warm water means more moisture for the weather patterns that have been moving into the Southwest over the last month. A separate system in late October, for instance, became one of the most extreme storms in Colorado’s history, pelting higher elevations with up to 8 inches of rain in four days, causing widespread destruction. “It’s just really extreme amounts of water vapor in the atmosphere that have been aimed into the Southwest in each of those storms,” Schumacher said.

This autumn precipitation primed Arizona, Colorado, and other Southwestern states for yet more destruction this past week. For one, rivers were already running high, then ran all the higher. And two, if soils are soaked, a follow-up bout of rain will run off and cause flooding. “We get the second storm, just a little bit after the first one, then everything was primed for even worse flooding this time around,” Schumacher said. 

Read Next California has a plan for El Niño’s torrential rain: Save it for later Matt Simon

In mountainous terrain, this gets especially dangerous, as the topography funnels rainwater into raging torrents. “If you hike around the Southwest, you’re going to see out-of-place boulders all over the place,” Crimmins said. “Water put it there. Maybe it was 5,000 years ago or something like that, but water moves. We can have really epic flash flooding.”

The one silver lining here is that any increased precipitation from this El Niño could bring drought relief to much of the southern U.S., according to NOAA’s projections. Climate change is not only exacerbating these ongoing dry spells — hotter temperatures also increase evaporation from reservoirs. At the same time, populations are growing in the Southwest, meaning more people demanding more water. 

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.insetlabel{font-weight:500;font-size:12px;fill:#6B665E} @media (max-width:800px){.el-nino-drought-outlook#el-nino-drought-outlook svg.map .fxlabel{font-size:26px}.el-nino-drought-outlook#el-nino-drought-outlook svg.map .insetlabel{font-size:18px}} @media (max-width:480px){.el-nino-drought-outlook#el-nino-drought-outlook svg.map .fxlabel{font-size:38px}.el-nino-drought-outlook#el-nino-drought-outlook svg.map .insetlabel{font-size:24px}} @media (prefers-reduced-motion:reduce){.el-nino-drought-outlook#el-nino-drought-outlook *{transition:none !important}} Drought could ease across the South this winter

Seasonal drought outlook through January 31, 2027

WorseningPersistingDevelopingImprovingEndingPuerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands

Source: NOAA Climate Prediction Center U.S. Seasonal Drought Outlook

Clayton Aldern / Grist

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With these factors conspiring, the Colorado River’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, are approaching the point of collapse. The potential for more rainfall this winter might help fill them, Schumacher said, but it can’t reverse the system’s precipitous decline. “It’s a long way to go to get even back to where we were a year ago,” he said. “Let alone when it was in good condition decades ago.”

The wildcard this year is snowpack: It’s still too early to tell, Schumacher said, how much snow will fall in Colorado. Whereas rainwater flows quickly into rivers, making it harder to store without overwhelming infrastructure — hence all the destructive flooding of late — snowpack slowly releases water as things thaw in the spring. With a record low snowpack earlier this year, Colorado is in desperate need of bountiful flakes in the months ahead.

Water agencies can’t change the weather, but they can at least change how they manage precipitation. Down in Arizona, cities like Tucson have been installing green infrastructure — basically dirt spaces that hydrate native plants — which slow down the flow of water, thus preventing flooding. “There’s really cool and clever ways of thinking about stormwater as a resource,” Crimmins said, “rather than a nuisance.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Extreme flooding in the Southwest foreshadows a wild El Niño winter on Nov 5, 2026.

Companies are looking again at how to put more farmland under solar without disrupting operations or clashing with conditions, but is social licence pressure high enough in Australia?

The post Cows and cyclones: New push to design solar farms for cattle and climate, but is Australia ready? appeared first on Renew Economy.

TORONTO — Winners of this year's Clean Fleet Awards are collectively saving an estimated $25 million annually in fuel costs and reducing oil consumption by approximately 250,000 barrels a year, demonstrating the financial benefits of going electric...

From the Epstein files to offshore tax havens and private islands, the world’s wealthiest are increasingly finding ways to operate beyond the reach of democratic governments. Decades of globalisation and political complicity have allowed oligarchs to carve out spaces where they can ignore laws and escape public accountability. As their power grows, democratic institutions are left increasingly hollowed out. Can the Greens help reverse this democratic retreat by bringing oligarchs back under public control?

For many years, international headlines have been haunted by the long, ugly shadow of the Epstein files. It has become clear from the revelations in the documents that those given power in the globalised economy are now operating as oligarchs beyond the reach of democratic government.

These files give a glimpse into just one of the conspiracies between the wealthy and the politicians who serve them. A decade ago, the leaks of financial details of the global elite through the Panama and Paradise Papers painted a similar picture of a corrupt class of citizens of nowhere who manipulate democratic politicians as though from some high-tech Mount Olympus. Far from public scrutiny, they have created spaces where they can live according to their own whims. I call these spaces “lacunae”, places where the oligarchs can ignore the laws framed by elected politicians, avoid paying their taxes, and engage in their unhinged fantasies. This disengagement by the world’s richest and most powerful men is ineluctably destroying the democracy that has prevailed at least in the West since the end of World War II.

We can trace this subversion of democracy back 30 years, to the process of globalisation that enabled the super-wealthy to escape the democratic compact. It is nearly three decades since protesters were in the streets outside intergovernmental meetings in Seattle, London, Washington, and Melbourne, resisting political attempts to allow corporations to rule the world. And as Greens, we argued that this eventuality would be disastrous for our environment and our society as it would enable spaces beyond democratic control – exactly the sorts of “lacunae” we see now.

Politicians like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair invented the framework they called the Third Way, seeking to counter the extreme marketisation of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher but institutionalising corporate globalisation. Legal changes enshrined in agreements like NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), public-private partnerships, and deep financial deregulation were part of a deliberate handing away of power that has since been used to justify performative helplessness in the face of growing corporate power. The devastating consequences of this abnegation of democratic authority are now visible all around us: the question is, what can we, as Greens, do about it?

This article is based on thinking that I outline more fully in a pamphlet I recently published, where I describe five lacunae: knowledge, moral, legal, tax, and monetary. In this article I will outline in brief the legal and tax lacunae; the others are described in the pamphlet itself.

Offshore and beyond the law

Not content with lobbying and bullying politicians to reduce their tax rates and the regulation that constrained their worst excesses, the oligarchs have begun to create worlds altogether beyond the reach of elected politicians, in the offshore secrecy jurisdictions that have always enabled the wealthy to operate beyond the law. Think, for instance, of settlements like Peter Thiel’s Próspera on the island of Roatán in Honduras, or Elon Musk’s drug-fuelled fantasies of off-world colonies on Mars. These are what I call the “legal lacunae”.

In his seminal book Captive State (2000), George Monbiot lays out many examples of how insidiously corporate domination creeps into government. Monbiot details a series of case studies of local and national governments handing over power to corporations, ranging from the corporate takeover of the British National Health Service (NHS) to the supine acceptance of “genetic engineering” techniques and a series of pro-corporate trade treaties. One of these agreements was especially shocking: the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), the plan for corporate domination that we have seen play out over the past three decades.

Negotiated in secret, the draft treaty was leaked in 1997 and was due to be signed in Paris in October 1998. By then, French citizens had seen the threats to laws they valued, like those protecting their food and farming sector and their film industry, and then-prime minister Lionel Jospin withdrew his country from the agreement, leading to the MAI’s ultimate collapse. It is worth noting again that this was being done in secret; without a courageous whistle-blower leaking the draft we would have known nothing about it and politicians would have waved it through.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Bill Clinton betrayed the trust of the American workers by facilitating the process of globalisation that would destroy their conditions of work and life. Through NAFTA (1994), and then by radically extending the power of the World Trade Organisation so that it could overrule national democratically elected governments, Clinton was a key architect of the legal lacuna within which corporations and oligarchs have thrived. His embrace of trade with Beijing and support for admitting China into the WTO in 2001, with special status as a “developing country” was the final nail in the coffin of employment and environmental standards in the US.

People were told at the time that only the low-skilled jobs would be offshored, and that those who lost them would be able to retrain for well-paid jobs in service of the new-style, globalised economy. This didn’t happen, and what we see now is the implicit bargain politicians struck with the oligarchs: that we would lose skilled, well paid employment, but in return, we would get cheaper consumer goods, including virtual products. This trade-off was entirely concealed at the time, no doubt for fear it would be rejected. Undoubtedly, politicians of the Left, like Blair and Clinton, felt they were doing their best for working people by bowing to the “inevitable” tide of globalisation and at least guaranteeing an enhanced lifestyle through a wider range of cheap consumer goods. But the implicit trade-off in terms of quality employment was never made explicit and has led to disillusionment amongst voters. The lies now being told around AI are similar: citizens can get computers to run your their while they sit on the sofa spending their income on having food and goods delivered to their door.

Behind this smokescreen of an interconnected global village with higher living standards and continuing skilled employment, corporations were making use of the global nature of the new markets to evade protective legislation in the national markets where they sold their products by producing them offshore. This critique was made explicitly by many Greens, but we were dismissed as radicals, dreamers, and “conspiracy theorists”. The threats that were clear to many of us nearly 30 years ago have since become a reality. And it is now time to demand politicians who do not sell us out to powerful corporations and oligarchs out of self-interest or sheer laziness.

Tax haven; democratic hell

The tax haven is the prototype lacuna. It goes without saying that most ultra-rich people have not amassed their wealth through generosity of spirit and many resent having to contribute any of their assets for the public benefit through taxation. It was the tax haven that taught them how they could evade their responsibility for the social contract and live entirely selfish, self-serving lives. It is also the area I know most about, having spent five years as an MEP trying to build a fair global taxation system.

The story of the tax haven begins in the era of decolonisation, when rich and powerful Europeans who had literally “owned” other people’s land and operated it as a personal, self-enriching fief were forced to give up this injustice. Their public response was to accept the inevitable with as much grace as they could muster, while out of sight they created lacunae that enabled them to carry on the centuries of exploitation that had made them and their families rich. The UK overseas territories were vital to this process, as the country hung onto various random pieces of land that were so small as to be easily overlooked but where those with enough wealth, power, and connections to make use of them hid their wealth and continued to avoid paying their fair share.

The Brits also invented that deceitful fiction, the trust. The trust is basically a conjuring trick: money is temporarily placed in limbo, without an apparent owner. For tax and regulatory purposes, it is made to disappear. Money in trusts apparently belongs to nobody and is completely unregulated. The law around trusts plays with the concept of ownership, allowing the wealthy to separate themselves from their assets, which are assigned to trustees. Because the purpose of the trust is to conceal assets, we cannot provide data for the volume of tax evaded through this means. However, the Tax Justice Network (TNJ) has given some particularly extreme examples, such as Sam and Charles Wyly in the United States, who set up a number of offshore trusts to shield more than 1 billion dollars in family wealth. TNJ also mentions the Duke of Westminster in the UK, who managed to inherit an estate of 9 billion pounds held in trust, escaping around 3 billion pounds in tax. There is an obvious answer here: that all governments should be required to create registers listing the beneficial owners of all trusts falling under their jurisdiction, something Greens have argued for in the European Parliament.

As oligarchs have moved their cash offshore, the tax base has become eroded. As a result, it has become harder and harder for democratic politicians to invest in the sorts of public services and infrastructure that citizens of democratic societies expect. The value that is accrued by the billionaires is sucked out of the bank accounts of citizens, who blame their immiseration on the politicians they chose to protect them. Unless democratic politicians find the courage and strategy to challenge the oligarchy, the future of democracy looks uncertain. Young people in particular are losing faith in democracy and moving to the political extremes, including to parties who idealise street action above democratic engagement.

During my time as an MEP (2014-20) I sat on a number of tax investigatory committees, all created as Green initiatives. We helped to expose tax avoidance on a massive scale, with the active support of some very brave journalists and employees of the offshore industry who were prepared to risk everything to lift the veil on the secrecy that shields the financial activities of the rich and powerful. Rather like the Epstein files, first the Panama Papers and then the Paradise Papers made public what the oligarchs and their lackeys would rather was kept secret. It bears repeating that what we see here is a mere glimpse of the corruption of global elites – if only a few sets of documents from a handful of companies can implicate this many, what would full transparency achieve?

So what do we do?

As a Green politician, I’ve spent most of my life trying to gain power through the ballot box and use it to make life better for people and planet. But what can be done if the power has actually escaped from the democratic system altogether? What should we as Greens do about that? Clearly, we need politicians at national level with the courage to restore the power that politicians had over domestic laws before the process of globalisation, as discussed above. But it is precisely the movement of companies beyond national jurisdiction that is entailed in globalisation that requires a wider response.

The paradox of our time is that democratic politics is failing just when we need politicians to have the most courage. But the democratic crisis offers an opportunity to those who are genuine democrats and prepared to take on the oligarchs. I see a historic role for Green parties in this moment of crisis. The lacunae I have identified are the direct result of generations of politicians working hand-in-glove with oligarchs and the corporate hierarchy. Voters have grasped this democratic betrayal and their response is to reject “establishment” politicians. For many this means choosing the far right; but Greens are opposed to the establishment too, and just as ready to work for the people, as we have always done.

The policy proposals needed to bring the oligarchs back within democratic control are obvious but not easy. We cannot expect the problems of the last 30 years to be solved overnight, but we can demand of our politicians that they identify the problem, abandon their posture of learned helplessness, and start working together to solve it. We need to have the courage to explain our political project within this framework: the Greens are already leading the charge against fascism, yet we must go further and build a concerted and practical policy platform to challenge oligarchic power. I am not arguing that we should become populists, proposing simple solutions to complex problems. Quite the reverse, in fact: a populist approach to politics leads to repeated disappointment with failed saviours who are seen to have feet of clay – and ultimately disillusionment with democratic politics itself. Greens can be bold and brave, but we can also be practical. We need to be all three just now.

A number of specific and detailed legal changes are necessary to close the lacunae but some are particular urgently needed. Perhaps the most important is that all pieces of territory across the globe should be required to either be subject to the UN as independent states or become formally part of territories that are. As we found from the Epstein files, the “overseas territory” always was and still is the apotheosis of the lacunae we are seeking to fill. While we can demand much more from our domestic politics, it is also inevitable when seeking to contain people and companies who deliberately belong nowhere that we need to have international cooperation to bring them back down to earth.

Because transnational corporations and off-world oligarchs are hard to constrain by democracies that operate at nation-state level, we also need politicians who are still committed to democracy and the rule of law to work together across national boundaries to reclaim their power. It was the escape from nation-state legal systems that turbo-charged the global oligarchy: only transnational cooperation can reclaim our power from them. I label this agreement between countries still committed to democracy and the rule of law a “coalition of the honourable”. Without it, the oligarchs will continue their game of divide-and-conquer – and we will all be the losers.

A coalition of the honourable

Canadian prime minister Mark Carney received much praise for the speech he made at the 56th World Economic Forum in Davos, where he argued that “intermediate powers like Canada, are not powerless”. They have the capacity to build a new order that encompasses our values, such as respect for human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty and territorial integrity of the various states.

While his rhetoric was welcome, Carney is wrong to think that capitalism can go through this “rupture” without significant reorganisation of its own structures, and this is where the proposals of green politics are so vital. While posturing as a bastion of sustainability and virtue on the world stage, Canada acts as home base to some of the most destructive mining companies in the world. To be taken seriously, the country would have to sign up to the UN binding treaty1 and bring into line its corporations that have been causing thousands of deaths across the world. In other words, without green politics and green policies, the domination of the oligarchs and the corporations will never be effectively challenged.

How feasible is this sort of international cooperation at a time of rising nationalism? It would be wrong to suggest that, because many people are choosing nationalist, fascist parties, the majority have given up hope in cooperation between countries: the data shows clearly that the opposite is the case. Earlier this year, the Rockefeller Foundation published a vast 34-country survey asking people about their views on international cooperation: 57 per cent of respondents thought that their country should cooperate to solve global challenges even if it meant compromising on national interests, and this had risen two points from the previous year.

This idea of an international effort like the coalition of the honourable is supported by 61 per cent of global citizens according to the Rockefeller poll. The fascists are trying to foster the sort of selfish, exclusionary, nationalist politics that leads inevitably to competition, impoverishment, and war, but a majority are resisting this. A survey commissioned by the UN Foundation and conducted by GeoPoll asked 5,000 people in 20 countries (including all 15 members of the Security Council) for their views on international cooperation. They found that nearly nine in ten believed that even the world’s most powerful countries need the international system rather than trying to confront today’s problems on their own. Their conclusion is that disappointment with the way international bodies are performing has not undermined the understanding that such cooperation is vital.

Greens have been developing politics of social justice and defence of the planet for decades, and we have also developed a pluralist and inclusive style we call “doing politics differently”, where we accept that all parties have something to offer, however difficult this may prove to be in the heated reality of a coalition government. This sort of cooperation is going to be vital to build our strength in challenging the oligarchs, and we will need to accept this reality as we seek to recover from the decades when those who governed our countries ceded power to the Pax Americana and the corporations.

Trump’s second term has underlined what we should really have known a decade ago: those countries that are still committed to human rights, democracy, and the rule of law need to urgently replumb our social and economic systems that are currently dominated by the very companies that are threatening our future. This means building strategic autonomy in finance and IT, as well as critical minerals and supply chains.

This proposal is challenging but not unrealistic. Countries that can broadly be considered to still respect democratic values and the rule of law (including the UK, most EU members, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand) together represent nearly a third of the global economy. This is a secure basis on which to build a new world order, and one that feels considerably more dependable than relying on the US or China.

Revitalising democracy

We can only expect citizens to share our respect for the rule of law and democratic government if we can demonstrate that it works for them. This means calling out the politicians of centre-left and centre-right who handed power to the oligarchs and making strong, practical proposals for taking that power back. We can see some important steps in that direction being taken; for example, the 890-million-euro fine imposed on Google by the EU for market abuse and the preliminary finding against Meta for addictive design of Instagram and Facebook, both under the Digital Markets Act (DMA).

It is no accident that the growth of the lacunae has been accompanied by the diminution of our political dialogue and the shrinkage of our public space; nor that some of the leading oligarchs are also the purveyors of rhetorical division and disinformation. The EU democracy shield is a deliberate attempt to counter this, as is the UK’s proposed National Centre for Information Defence. Similarly, the funding for the European Digital Media Observatory and the European Fact-Checking Standards Network are a step in the right direction, as is the UK’s Amplify: The Local Media Action Plan. None of this legislation goes far enough but it does make clear that European lawmakers still consider it their role to regulate the public space, in contrast to the US, where the oligarchs have been handed untrammelled power.

The fight for truth matters but it is in the arena of political economy that the future of democracy will be won or lost. The detailed platform of tax legislation proposed by Greens in the European Parliament is vital, followed by an agreement by the coalition of honourable countries to implement external tariffs against countries that renege and allow oligarchs to continue their flouting of the social contract. Other necessary steps include introducing legislation requiring proactive rather than retrospective licensing of products – including digital ones – and establishing a reconstructed and democratised global trade body to replace the WTO. Our politicians chose to give away their control and they can and must choose to take it back.

The hegemonic power of US capitalism and the corporations and oligarchs that comprise it can feel overwhelming, but the Epstein files are the chink in their armour. Just as we pushed through anti-money laundering legislation by leveraging the revelation that financial secrecy had enabled the funding of the 9/11, we should now use the powerful disgust aroused by the filth of the Epstein revelations to mobilise the energy to shut down the lacunae where the oligarchs destroy the life chances of global citizens.

1. The UN Binding Treaty is a proposed international agreement to require transnational corporations to respect human rights and ensure accountability for abuses linked to their activities. ︎

Our bird's-eye view Channel Comment brendan 5th November 2026 Teaser Media

A NSW parliamentary inquiry has recommended the government require data centres to supply their own 100 per cent renewable energy on an hourly basis. 

The post Data centre probe prompts call for tighter renewable energy requirements in coal state appeared first on Renew Economy.

Nearly 7M U.S. school students may be exposed to pesticides used to treat crop fields Anthony Lacey November 5, 2026 Geoff Horsfield Al Rabine 1 in 4 schools within a quarter-mile of pesticide-treated fields, new EWG analysis shows November 5, 2026

Nearly 20,000 U.S. public elementary and middle schools sit within a quarter-mile of crop fields where harmful pesticides may be sprayed, a new EWG analysis finds. Almost 7 million students attend those schools and could be exposed, including more than 575,000 at schools within 200 feet of a field.

Pesticide applications could be putting children, families and school staff at risk because they lack basic protections such as buffer zones and warnings. 

INTERACTIVE MAP U.S. elementary and middle schools near crop fields

This map shows the number and percentage of elementary and middle schools within a quarter mile, 1,000 feet and 200 feet of what the Department of Agriculture considers to be a crop field. These schools have the potential to be in the “spray zone” of pesticides that may be used on these fields. Pesticides sprayed on crop land can harm children who attend schools nearby.

View here

Children face higher risks of the potential health harms linked to pesticides because their developing bodies and nervous systems are more vulnerable to chemical toxicity. Two hundred feet is close enough for harmful drift to reach classrooms and playgrounds. In addition to students, thousands of teachers and other school staff are at risk. 

EWG’s new map allows users to see how many schools in their state, county, congressional district or state legislative district are at risk. It does not account for public high schools or private schools. Nor does it include the thousands of public parks, playgrounds and ball fields where children live and play that may also be sprayed with pesticides. Schools were considered if they contained at least one grade that is K-8. 

Research shows that pesticides are often detected inside homes as far as a half-mile from spraying. EWG found 1,932 public elementary and middle schools within just 200 feet of application and 19,208 within a quarter-mile of a crop field that could be treated with pesticides – one out of every four schools in America.

And it doesn’t matter where kids go to school – this is a nationwide issue:

• In New York, over 550 schools are within a quarter-mile of a crop field, totaling over 200,000 students. 
• In Ohio, almost 1,000 schools and 400,000 children are within a quarter-mile of a crop field.  
• In Florida, over 270 schools and almost 150,000 children. 
• In Colorado, 340 schools and over 100,000 children.  
• In Vermont, more than 71% of schools in the state are within a quarter-mile of a crop field. 

But families lack key information about these commercial pesticide applications. Parents and caregivers deserve the certainty of knowing their children are not being exposed to harmful pesticides when they are at school. They have the right to know when pesticides are being applied near their schools, who is applying them, what is being applied and what precautions are being taken to protect children.

EWG’s map makes it clear that Congress must do more to protect consumers and kids at schools from commercial applications of toxic chemicals. 

That’s why EWG and Consumer Reports are urging Congress to reject any new pesticide laws unless they include the Consumer Pesticide Safety Bill of Rights – a road map for making the food Americans eat and the communities they live in safer. It addresses long-running gaps in pesticide protection, and it includes a call for Congress to ensure that children are safe from pesticide exposure while at school.

What are the health risks of pesticide exposure?

Studies show that living near pesticide spraying is linked to harm to the respiratory system, increased risk of cancer and harm to the developing fetus, such as low birth weight and reduced IQ. 

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, children are especially susceptible to potential health problems stemming from pesticide exposure, such as neurological and behavioral development, endocrine disruption and cancer.

Spraying creates dangers not just for kids at schools close to fields where pesticides are used but also for those in more distant neighborhoods, where chemicals may drift.

Pesticide air monitoring has shown some pesticides can travel miles from the application site. Evidence suggests health harms such as pediatric cancers may be associated with pesticide applications up to 2.5 miles away. 

How is pesticide use regulated near schools?

Many states, cities and counties have adopted legal standards to restrict pesticide spraying near schools, citing the risks it poses to children, whose bodies and brains are still developing. But these protections vary from state to state.

More than 40 states – including Georgia, Illinois, New York, North Carolina and Texas – have restricted how and when pesticides can be sprayed near schools. 

Alabama and North Carolina, for example, ban crop dusting near schools. Many other states – including Arizona, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan and New Hampshire – have placed buffer zones that restrict pesticide spraying around schools. 

Illinois and other states require that alerts be posted on school grounds to tell students before or after spraying. 

Some states, including Kentucky, Minnesota and Nevada, require that parents be notified. Others, like Louisiana and Pennsylvania, require schools to track students who are sensitive to pesticides. 

Other states, including Georgia and New Mexico, limit the hours when pesticides can be sprayed near schools. California prohibits pesticide applications within a quarter-mile of public schools during the hours when children are most likely to be present. The state also requires additional notifications, reporting and training, 

What should the Environmental Protection Agency and Congress do?

State regulations and laws are inconsistent, and many help parents and students only after they have been exposed to toxic chemicals or when it is too late. 

The standards also always assume pesticides will be applied without error by the applicator –  something that isn’t always done.

Instead, the federal government should set a minimum standard for buffer zones around schools, and ensure states’ ability to go further. Even though the people who spread the chemicals on farm fields may already be required to wear special protective gear, communities nearby remain unprotected. 

Congress and the EPA can also ensure proper notifications are sent if pesticides are applied near schools, as many states already require. 

Parents and families should not have to track down a government registry, pay a fee or require a doctor’s note to be notified of pesticide applications that could expose them, their children or their pets to toxics. Families deserve to know whether someone living or working near their home has applied pesticides that can make people sick. 

As with some state programs, the EPA and states should work together to proactively notify people of commercial pesticide applications near their homes and schools. This would give parents more information to potentially lower their kids’ exposure risk.

Pesticide companies, including Bayer’s Monsanto and ChemChina’s Syngenta, are actively trying to hide pesticide application information from consumers. These companies are trying to boost pesticide sales and hide the risks from industrial chemical use. 

Now, they’re trying to push Congress to quickly reauthorize a pesticide law, the Pesticide Registration Improvement Act, without making any changes to protect the public. 

Congress might consider renewing the Pesticide Registration Improvement Act as early as December. The current law, through which the chemical industry negotiates fees that fund the EPA’s pesticide reviews, is set to expire next September. 

Lawmakers shouldn’t support any new pesticide law that fails to protect consumers and kids at school. Any such legislation should adopt EWG and Consumer Reports’ Consumer Pesticide Safety Bill of Rights – making clear that consumers deserve to be protected from toxic chemicals. 

Happy day-after-Election Day!

When we started our Vote for Climate Justice campaign last election cycle, our goal was to infuse every part of Portland’s City Council elections with climate justice. So together, with all of you, we educated voters and candidates on the issues impacting our rivers, our trees, our air, our communities, and our climate, knowing that education and stories can lead to action. We saw the fruits of that work last election, and we see it now.

Thank you. Thank you for voting. Thank you for helping your friends, family, and neighbors vote. Thank you for being a part of our Vote for Climate Justice program. Now let’s continue showing up and speaking up together, for justice and with joy, for our neighbors, our planet, and all of our futures. If you’re feeling inspired, consider supporting us with a donation to keep this successful grassroots organizing going! Rumble on the River: Post-Election Reflection & Directions

Thursday, November 12
Havurah Shalom (825 NW 18th Ave)
Doors at 5:30 PM, Panel discussion at 6:30 PM

Panelists:

• Dr. Tammy Carpenter – OR Representative-Elect in District 27
• Rep. Travis Nelson – OR Representative, District 44
• Angelo Bologna – AFSCME Local 328
• Josie Moberg – Immigration Attorney
• Matt Reed – Oregon Education Association
• Nafisah Ula – Jobs with Justice
• Moderated by: Damon Motz-Storey – Director of Policy & Communications for Portland City Councilor Candace Avalos

Together, We Make a Difference

In September and October, the 350PDX community sent over 1000 emails to City Council, plus dozens of written comments, speaking up about a data center resolution, the transfer of Zenith Energy’s franchise to I Squared Capital, a strong Critical Energy Infrastructure Hub policy with a significant drawdown of fossil fuels, a No Immunity for Big Oil resolution, and an investment policy that excludes all fossil fuels.

•  No secret deals for data centers passed!
• The Zenith Energy franchise transfer went through without additional community protections or industry accountability
• No Immunity for Big Oil resolution passed!
• Critical Energy Infrastructure Hub strong amendments passed! The final draft will come to Council November 5 and 12, we’ll let you know if further action is needed.

We still need to speak up about the City’s investment policy. The proposed policy adds in an Environmental, Social, and Governance framework for ethical investing, but does not exclude natural gas or coal. Speak up for fossil fuel divestment by sending this email, or submitting a written or verbal comment (this testimony toolkit has talking points and links).

Two Upcoming Actions at City Council

Building on our momentum from the last couple months, let’s finish 2026 strong by advocating for two important issues: reducing building emissions in large buildings, and banning tear gas. These policies are both a long time coming, and this is the moment to pass them! However, they’re receiving a lot of push-back, so we need to show major community support. See these and other actions on our Take Action page.

Fight NW Natural: Pass Climate & Health Standards for Existing Buildings

Portland environmental justice and tenant rights groups have been working on a building emissions reduction policy for over 5 years, targeting buildings over 20,000 square feet, and it’s finally been introduced in the Housing & Permitting Committee. Unfortunately, NW Natural and their industry allies have been flooding City Council with negative comments, even though this policy is similar to Building Performance Standards already in place in other cities like Seattle, Denver, Boston, New York, and Washington, DC. Written comment is open through December 1 (this toolkit has talking points and links). Sign up for a testimony training on November 23 by emailing cherice@350pdx.org!

Ban Tear Gas in Portland with a “Right to Breathe Act”

Tear gas and other chemical weapons used for “crowd control” are not only damaging to human health and people’s rights to speech and assembly, but they’re also harmful to waterways, trees, birds, animals, plants, and soil. After a presentation by Portland Police last week where they tried to convince City Council they should continue to be allowed to gas us, they need to hear from the public.  Learn more, submit written testimony by Thursday 11/5, and stay tuned for further opportunities to speak up.

Energy Justice Team:

The Energy Justice Team works together on everything from fighting data centers, Zenith, and the CEI Hub to advocating for PCEF and transportation justice! Our next team meeting is VIRTUAL on next Tuesday, November 10 at 6 PM. Reach out to dineen@350pdx.org and cherice@350pdx.org for the link or to get plugged into the team.

The “Bipartisan American Affordability & Jobs” Bill (U.S. Senate Bill 5653) is a fast-moving threat to public advocacy, sovereign Tribal nations, and our climate and environment. It would dismantle the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, the National Historic Preservation Act and the Endangered Species Act. All of the legal and regulatory tools we’ve used over the past decade in our region to stop pipelines, energy terminals, and power plants could be erased by this bill. It’s a giveaway to Big Tech and the fossil fuel industry.

350PDX and over 60 other organizations across the Pacific Northwest sent a letter opposing the bill to US Senators and Representatives in Oregon and Washington. Use this tool to send a message to your Senators and Representatives urging them to oppose this bill, and check out this Opposition Guide for more ways to take action.

Forest Defense Team:

This week the Forest Defense Team continued our campaign planning. The discussions have been detailed, exciting, fruitful, and challenging due to the current threats facing forested land. One campaign we advocating for is the continuation of funding for the Trees in the Curb Zone pilot project which has aims to create infrastructure and increase tree canopy in low-canopy neighborhoods. Additionally, the team plans to continue the ongoing push to get long-term funding for street tree maintenance.

Learn about Portland’s new Street Tree Care program from Parks & Recreation Urban Forestry staff on November 13 at 9 AM. This pilot program is the culmination of a 5-year campaign by 350PDX and partner organizations to provide proactive tree care, first called for 80 years ago. RSVP to noelle@350pdx.org

The Forest Defense Team meets on the first and third Monday of each month, alternating between virtual and in-person meetings. Our next meeting will be on November 16 from 6 – 7:30 PM. Reach out to tyler@350PDX.org for details.

Art Team:

Last month, the Art Team brought our mourning mothers to the No Kings protest and passed out flyers encouraging attendees to engage with 350PDX’s upcoming actions! Additionally, we have been hard at work on a surprise project for our end of year fundraising.

The Art Team meets twice a month. We host our art builds on the second Sunday of every month and our monthly planning meetings on the last Wednesday.

• Next Art Build: November 8, 1 – 4PM
• Next Planning Meeting: Wednesday, November 25, 6 – 7:30 PM

Meetings are held in the 350PDX workshop (3639 N Mississippi Ave). RSVP to arts@350pdx.org.

Book Club:

The 350PDX Book Club meets every month on the first Wednesday of the month at 6:30PM, alternating between virtual and in-person. Reach out to books@350PDX.org with any questions or to join our list, and please RSVP so we can inform you of any meeting changes.

Lots of Book Club announcements this month: our virtual meetings are BACK, we are meeting MONTHLY again, our in-person meetings are back home at the 350PDX Offices, and we’re excited to welcome our newest co-facilitator, Ian Murdock. Welcome!

Join us on Wednesday, December 2 at 6:30 PM for our next fiction in-person meeting. We’ll discuss A Snake Falls to Earth by Darcie Little Badger; based on traditional Lipan Apache storytelling structure, this young adult novel weaves an unforgettable tale of monsters, magic, and family. RSVP at books@350PDX.org.

Save the date for our other upcoming discussions:

• Wednesday, January 6 at 6:30 PM (free pick; Google Meet): Book to be selected in December

• Wednesday, February 3 at 6:30 PM (nonfiction; 350PDX Offices): The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue: A Story of Climate and Hope on One American Street by Mike Tidwell

Milwaukie Advocates for Climate Justice:

The Milwaukie Advocates for Climate meet monthly on the third Monday from 5:30 – 6:30 PM at Milwaukie City Hall — all are welcome! To get connected, sign up here or email MAC@350pdx.org.

Join us on Friday, November 6th at 6:30 PM for a documentary screening of “The Little Town That Could” at the Ledding Library in Milwaukie. This is an inspiring documentary of a community in New York working together to reduce emissions. It will be followed by a panel discussion with filmmakers and local climate activists.

Washington County Team:

The Washington County Team invites all to our next monthly online meeting at 6:30 PM on Tuesday November 10. We are looking forward to discussing election results that could impact improving climate action policies and catching up with each other online.

Last month we enjoyed talking with Tualatin City Council member Bridget Brookes regarding a win for the Tualatin Climate Action Plan. The City recently completed work on the activation of a new micro-power turbine that will improve City building & fleet power while using cleaner energy and reducing Tualatin’s expenses. It will also capture power from the local drinking water source that’s been latent for decades. Embracing this innovation will make Tualatin more resilient in many ways.

We welcome guest presenters who would like to share their programs and local climate actions! Please reach out to us at 350washco@gmail.com if you would like to engage and educate our group on a future Tuesday evening!

We always welcome newcomers to our events and to our (mostly) monthly online meetings (6:30 PM on the second Tuesday of the month). For the link, join us here or contact us at 350washco@gmail.com.

Southwest Neighborhood Team:

The 350PDX Southwest Neighborhood Team includes neighborhoods on the south and west sides of Portland. We work together to raise awareness of the climate emergency.

Our street corner demonstrations continue weekly in November every Friday. New time is 3 – 4 PM at SW Terwilliger & SW Taylor’s Ferry. Some parking is available in the Chez Jose and Anytime Fitness lot, or reach us via bus or bike.

Our monthly meetings happen on the third Monday of the month. To get involved, please contact Pat Kaczmarek at patk5@msn.com.

Before closing our newsletter, a few reminders:

• Check out our Take Action page, which we update regularly. It includes actions that may not be in our newsletter.
• Join the 350PDX community Slack channel! This is a great way to stay connected on an ongoing basis. Contact to info@350pdx.org and we can add you.
• 350PDX is still searching for a wonderful, new home. Please reach out to info@350PDX.org if you have ideas for a space where we can have meetings, our arts team can create show-stopping puppets, and more!

Thank you for reading our monthly newsletter. We hope to see you soon!

With gratitude,

Cherice, Dineen, Jessica, Maeve, and Noelle

The post 2026 November Newsletter! appeared first on 350PDX: Climate Justice.

China’s rapidly-expanding clean energy generation and deepening electrification has made the country more resilient to energy shocks, bolstering its position ahead of the COP31 climate talks in Türkiye, where speeding up the world’s electrification is set to dominate.

The growth of China’s renewable energy capacity protected it from the economic fallout from the energy crisis triggered by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, according to analysis by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) published on Thursday.

As oil and gas stopped flowing through the key fossil fuel trade route, leading prices to soar, China’s crude oil imports – the largest in the world – fell sharply, leading the country to start drawing down on its reserves and curbing its exports of petroleum products.

“Yet, the import reduction did not produce the economic and social disruption in China one might normally expect from a shock of this scale,” the report found.   

As temporary adjustment cushioned the oil-import shock, clean power and the electrification of the transport sector buffered the economic costs.

The rise of renewable energy and nuclear power have reduced China’s fossil fuel imports bill by more than $9 billion since 2020, more than any other country, according to CREA.

“China remains exposed to imported fuels, particularly where oil is used as a chemical feedstock, but reducing fossil-fuel demand already contributes to energy security,” said Qi Qin, the report’s author.

The view from Beijing: vindicated

CREA’s analysis found the roll-out of electric vehicles (EVs) displaced 38 million tonnes of oil equivalent between March and August, equivalent to around 13% of China’s crude oil imports in the same period the previous year.

China’s ongoing reliance on coal-fired power plants also protected the country against oil and gas supply disruptions, although coal power generation remained broadly flat in the six months since the start of the Iran war, according to the report.

• Nov 3, 2026 News Brazil’s fossil fuel roadmap sketches out first global timetable The COP30 presidency’s voluntary timetable asks countries to plan first, then build up clean energy – only turning to oil and gas supplies from 2031 Read more
• Nov 3, 2026 News Canada, EU agree deeper cooperation on energy and cleantech supply chains Both sides have pledged to strengthen investment and trade cooperation to make cleantech supply chains more resilient to shocks Read more
• Nov 3, 2026 News Africa launches long-delayed energy bank to finance fossil fuel projects The Africa Energy Bank’s main aim is financing oil and gas projects, underscoring support among many African governments for continued fossil fuel development Read more

Li Shuo, director of China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute, told Climate home News that China’s all-of-the-above approach to energy development has provided the country with the strategic flexibility to face the oil shock.

“While China has often been criticised in previous years for moving too slowly away from coal, this year’s global energy market volatility has given Chinese policymakers a renewed sense of confidence. There is a growing sentiment in Beijing that recent events have vindicated China’s energy strategy as both prudent and pragmatic,” he said.

Can China support the electrification pledge?

Despite its vast cleantech build-out and rapid electrification boosting its energy resilience, China has stopped short of endorsing an initiative by COP31 host Türkiye to increase the global share of electricity to 35% in final energy use by 2035.

Li Gao, vice minister at the Ministry of ​Ecology and Environment, who will lead the Chinese delegation at COP31, told a press conference the electrification target was in line with Chinese policy. “We believe that increasing electrification levels will help promote a green and low-carbon energy transition and address climate change,” he said.

China’s position on the electrification initiative is one of the major questions hanging over the COP31 talks beginning in Antalya next week.

“What is clear is that China has the most to gain from accelerated electrification because of their manufacturing capabilities,” said Bruce Douglas, CEO of the Global Renewables Alliance.

In 2026 alone, China’s exports of solar panels, batteries, EV and other cleantech are on track to avoid emissions equivalent to Brazil’s annual emissions.

• Sep 8, 2026 Clean Energy Frontier China’s industrial engine starts to break its fossil fuel habit Despite a rebound in coal generation this year, clean energy from wind and solar is gaining ground on the fossil fuels that have powered decades of industry growth Read more
• Sep 22, 2026 News COP31 electrification pledge leaves out clean power commitment Campaigners and experts say the goal’s effectiveness in reducing emissions may be limited unless countries agree to meet it using only clean energy Read more
• Nov 3, 2026 News Brazil’s fossil fuel roadmap sketches out first global timetable The COP30 presidency’s voluntary timetable asks countries to plan first, then build up clean energy – only turning to oil and gas supplies from 2031 Read more

Türkiye’s proposal doesn’t include a commitment to produce the power from clean energy, nor does it explicitly link electrification to the transition away from fossil fuels – issues on which the EU has signalled it is ready to push back.  

But Chinese analysts say Beijing is unlikely to support linking a global electrification goal to commitments on phasing out fossil fuels.

Former French climate envoy Laurence Tubiana, the outgoing CEO of the European Climate Foundation, told Climate Home News that the EU and developed countries such as Brazil – which is influential within the BRICS group of large emerging economies – have a responsibility to push China to show leadership in the talks.

Driving the world’s electrification

The electrification of the Chinese economy has outpaced that of any other major economy.

In the US and the EU, the share of electrification has stagnated just above 20%. In China, it has doubled since 2005, reaching close to 30% in 2025.  

The International Energy Agency (IEA) expects China will remain the single largest driver of global electricity demand growth through to 2030, as it electrifies its manufacturing sector as well as growing demand for cooling and EV charging.

Over the next five years, the IEA forecasts that China will increase its electricity consumption by as much as the total electricity consumption of the EU today.

In August, the Chinese government set a target to boost the share of electricity in its final energy consumption to 35% by 2030 – five years ahead of Türkiye’s proposed goal.

From laggard to frontrunner

Clean-power growth and electrification could meet all of China’s rising power demand, according to CREA. By 2030, this would mean renewable and nuclear energy could reach 54% of power generation – exceeding China’s target to generate half its electricity from non-fossil sources by the end of the decade.

Clean electricity already met all of China’s demand growth in 2025. “The challenge lies in sustaining such growth over several years,” said Qin.

From Beijing’s perspective, the global targets such as the electrification pledge “no longer appear particularly ambitious or threatening”, said Li, of the Asia Society Policy Institute.

“China, long perceived as a climate laggard, is increasingly moving ahead of countries in the Global North. A global ceiling target is increasingly only a floor for China,” he emphasised.

The post Clean power shields China from oil shock more than any other country appeared first on Climate Home News.

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National Nurses United emphasized that the midterm elections’ stunning rebuke of the Trump administration’s billionaire-backed agenda is a direct result of voters’ anger over the cost of living, including the outrageous cost of health care. Nurses stressed that voters now expect Democrats to use the power they have been given to advance real, systemic change, and that means advancing Medicare for All.